An Experimental Setup for Assessing the Power Closure of Energy Harvesting Systems

Exploiting renewable energy sources in place of researchable batteries for powering portable electronic equipments is an attractive perspective. In practice, however, renewable energy sources are highly unreliable and the power closure of an energy harvesting system depends on the power profile of the source, on the efficiency of the energy scavenger and on the instantaneous power consumption of the system. In this paper we present an experimental setup that can be used to emulate the power behavior of an environmentally-powered system in order to support the early assessment of its power closure. We introduce the concept of "energy emulation", we outline the experimental setup and we report experimental results obtained for a simple case study