VTechWorks staff will be away for the Thanksgiving holiday beginning at noon on Wednesday, November 27, through Friday, November 29. We will resume normal operations on Monday, December 2. Thank you for your patience.
 

Multi-source Energy Harvesting for Wildlife Tracking

Simple item page
dc.contributor.authorWu, Youen
dc.contributor.committeechairZuo, Leien
dc.contributor.committeememberParker, Robert G.en
dc.contributor.committeememberSouthward, Steve C.en
dc.contributor.departmentMechanical Engineeringen
dc.date.accessioned2015-07-07T08:01:09Zen
dc.date.available2015-07-07T08:01:09Zen
dc.date.issued2015-07-06en
dc.description.abstractSufficient power supply to run GPS machinery and transmit data on a long-term basis remains to be the key challenge for wildlife tracking technology. Traditional ways of replacing battery periodically is not only time and money consuming but also dangerous to live-trapping wild animals. In this paper, an innovative wildlife tracking collar with multi-source energy harvester with advantage of high efficiency and reliability is proposed. This multi-source energy harvester entails a solar energy harvester and an innovative rotational electromagnetic energy harvester is mounted on the "wildlife tracking collar" which will extend the duration of wild life tracking by 20% time as was estimated. A feedforward and feedback control of DC-DC converter circuit is adopted to passively realize the Maximum Power Point Tracking (MPPT) logic for the solar energy harvester. A novel electromagnetic pendulum energy harvester with motion regulator is proposed which can mechanically rectify the irregular bidirectional swing motion of the pendulum into unidirectional rotational motion of the motor. No electrical rectifier is needed and voltage drops from diodes can be avoided, the EM pendulum energy harvester can provide 200~300 mW under the 0.4g base excitation of 4.5 Hz. The nonlinearity of the disengage mechanism in the pendulum energy harvester will lead to a broad bandwidth frequency response. Simulation results shows the broadband advantage of the proposed energy harvester and experiment results verified that at some frequencies over the natural frequency the efficiency is increased.en
dc.description.degreeMaster of Scienceen
dc.format.mediumETDen
dc.identifier.othervt_gsexam:5845en
dc.identifier.urihttp://hdl.handle.net/10919/54022en
dc.publisherVirginia Techen
dc.rightsIn Copyrighten
dc.rights.urihttp://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/en
dc.subjectMulti-source energy harvesteren
dc.subjectwildlife trackingen
dc.subjectelectromagnetic energy harvesteren
dc.subjectMechanical Motion Rectifier (MMR)en
dc.subjectsolar energy harvesteren
dc.subjectMaximum Power Point Tracking (MPPT)en
dc.titleMulti-source Energy Harvesting for Wildlife Trackingen
dc.typeThesisen
thesis.degree.disciplineMechanical Engineeringen
thesis.degree.grantorVirginia Polytechnic Institute and State Universityen
thesis.degree.levelmastersen
thesis.degree.nameMaster of Scienceen

Files

Original bundle
Now showing 1 - 1 of 1
Thumbnail Image
Name:
Wu_Y_T_2015.pdf
Size:
3.09 MB
Format:
Adobe Portable Document Format
Download

Collections

Masters Theses