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ollowing on the surge of interest in energy harvesting within the power electronics community the PSMA Energy Harvesting Committee has decided to organize an international workshop in May 2018 to enable interested parties from industry and academia to learn, share, collaborate and demonstrate.
Over the past 18 months since its reorganization, the PSMA Energy Harvesting Committee has increased from 7 to 32 members with representation by industry and academic organizations from US, Europe and Asia involved in semiconductor devices, sensors, storage devices, transducers, system and service providers.
There is an appetite both in the power sources industry and Internet of Things (IoT) industry to learn more about energy harvesting, understand its potential as well as it constraints in real-world applications. The need to replace batteries in ultra-low power IoT devices has become a major technical, cost and logistical issue that is significantly impeding the potential growth in this sector. However, this presents a major opportunity for the power electronics community to develop and introduce a new generation of ultra-low power devices with some kind of embedded regeneration capability.
The international workshop will follow the very successful format used at the PSMA Energy Harvesting Industry Session of APEC 2017, which will be a two-day event to enable more depth and to engage a broader audience providing participants with ample time to network, learn, form links and hopefully develop collaborative partnerships.
The workshop will also feature dedicated demonstrations from many top tier vendors of parts and systems to allow participants to view the technologies (hardware, visualization and simulation tools, etc.) in operation and interact directly with the developers. Whilst primarily targeting IoT, other applications will be considered subject to presentation material and demos collated as well as suggestions from intending participants. The workshop will demonstrate examples of successful energy harvesting products already created via synergies between the energy harvesting source and the load demand developers. A key workshop message and driver is that emerging technologies, if properly guided and integrated, will enable a dramatic penetration of energy harvesting solutions into a broader range of applications.
The targeted workshop attendees are a broad audience ranging from potential adopters of energy harvesting for IoT devices for specific applications (building management, medical technologies, assisted living, environmental, conditional monitoring of equipment, systems, power supplies) to industrial and academic developers of materials and devices (active and passive) to systems integrators and installers of IoT solutions.
Mike Hayes, PSMA Energy Harvesting Technical Committee, will co-chair the event which will be hosted Tyndall National Institute in Cork, Ireland. Tyndall is a major leading European epicenter for EU and industry funded research in energy harvesting and related IoT technologies.
Brian Zahnstecher, Principal of PowerRox, will co-chair the workshop, leveraging both his PSMA Energy Harvesting Committee experience as well as his experiences in IEEE PELS in running similar workshops nationally. PowerRox is a firm dedicated to solving power problems for those seeking to establish or enhance their position in the enterprise and consumer power electronics marketplace.
If anyone is interested in learning more about the workshop or interested in organizing, guiding or participating in the workshop please contact Mike or Brian. The latest information on the workshop can be found at http://www.psma.com/technical-forums/energy-efficiency/news.
Provided by Mike Hayes (Michael.hayes@tyndall.ie)
and Brian Zahnstecher (bz@powerrox.com)
PSMA Energy Harvesting Workshop Co-Chairs |
