Integration of Piezo Energy with Solar Energy

Abstract

Due to advances in the renewable energy technology, solar street lights are emerging as the new technology in smart cities. The solar street lights are powered by solar panels which generally light using LED’s connected in different combinations. These street lights are provided with rechargeable batteries which are charged by solar panel. Being an intermittent source, the idea of integrating the two renewables which could work when any of the sources is unavailable to produce energy is the notion of this work. By integrating solar with piezo electricity could reduce the emphasis on solar power and improve the overall efficiency of charging of battery. The integration of renewables has been done through connecting these sources with Dual Input Single Output (DISO) buck converter. A few modifications have been done on the DISO converters design and modelling which are present in the literature and achieved a new configuration. An automated (Embedded C programmed) switches have been provided parallelly to the sources as to provide path when any source is unavailable. The whole system has been simulated in MATLAB/Simulink and its respective results has been discussed. A hardware prototype for similar idea has been discussed. An extension of this work to state health monitoring (SHM) based Solar Impulse jet plane has been proposed and discussed the same.