Design and Development of Integrated Perovskite Photovoltaic Energy Harvesting System for Internet-of-Things and Building-Integrated Photovoltaic Applications

Abstract

As global energy demand increases, the growing emphasis on sustainable solutions has driven significant interest in advanced energy harvesting technologies. Perovskite solar cells (PSCs) are the third-generation photovoltaic (PV) technology that exhibits promising power conversion efficiency (PCE) under both indoor and outdoor illumination conditions. Despite their short lifetimes, PSCs demonstrate remarkable characteristics, including high efficiency, low-cost production, flexibility, color tunability, and semitransparency. There are many energy harvesting circuits available on the market, optimized for silicon PV, which makes up the majority of the PV market. However, using such circuits with PSCs will result in suboptimal performance due to differences in the properties of the perovskite material. Therefore, it is essential to develop PSCs with suitable circuits carefully. This thesis investigates the design, development, and experimental validation of a PSC-based system, with a focus on powering the Internet of Things (IoT) and building-integrated photovoltaic (BIPV) applications. This work proposes power consumption optimization for the selected potential IoT application to minimize energy consumption important for autonomous systems. On the other hand, a bus stop shelter has been proposed as a potential BIPV application to demonstrate the operational concept of the energy harvesting system platform. The theoretical model of the proposed system has been simulated in MATLAB (2021b) Simulink software. For both lighting conditions, the prototypes demonstrated high performance, achieving 99.9% tracking accuracy and more than 90% converter efficiency in simulations. The proposed energy harvesting system is experimentally validated by fabricating working prototypes and conducting physical testing with large PSCs fabricated in our laboratory. The experiment results show a minimum MPPT efficiency of 95.4%, while converter efficiencies of 62% and 73% were achieved for indoor and outdoor cases, respectively. A scenario with high converter efficiency (80 – 90%) demonstrates the proper operation of the designed converter. The large 30 cm × 30 cm PSC module was used with a buck converter setup to supply a load of up to 2352 mW at 84% conversion efficiency. The findings highlight the potential of PSCs to provide sustainable energy solutions in varied lighting conditions, thereby contributing to advancements in renewable energy technologies for autonomous systems.