Having already successfully demonstrated a solution that can extract energy from single-phase wire, they have now expanded on this by developing hardware that can be used with three-phase cabling.
The multifaceted energy harvesting solution is said to be unique to the market and consists of an e-peas AEM30940 high-performance power management IC (PMIC) accompanied by a TCT current transformer featuring one of the company’s proprietary high-permeability ferromagnetic cores.
The current transformer is clipped around the cable and the AC current it extracts via induction from the cable is subsequently converted into a DC current using rectification circuitry - the AEM30940 can then utilize this to power the electronic system it is connected to.
According to the companies. there are a growing number of IoT-related applications that will benefit from this latest innovation, allowing energy-autonomous sensing and communication equipment to be deployed anywhere that there is nearby AC electricity distribution infrastructure. The need to send out engineers to replace batteries will be eliminated.
Among the opportunities that this solution will be able to address are industrial control/monitoring, building automation, smart grid, environment monitoring, etc.
“Our company has been working closely with e-peas for just over two years, and what we have been able to achieve will have major implications for the emerging IoT sector,” explained Alexandre Decombejean, Sales Manager at TCT. “The low cold-start capabilities of e-peas PMICs really provide the differentiation that we needed for this energy harvesting arrangement. Other devices would mean that too much of the available energy would simply be wasted.”
“The new three-phase cable energy harvesting hardware we are now demonstrating will give us access to a broad selection of different deployment possibilities, allowing battery-less operation to be implemented across a multitude of customer applications,” added Christian Ferrier, e-peas’ CMO. “We envisage this solution being pivotal in enabling widespread implementation of smart factory and smart city projects around the world.”
