MSc thesis project proposal

[2020] Energy Storage Efficiency (MSc thesis project at Nowi)

Project outside the university

Nowi
About Nowi

The Nowi team is developing ‘Plug & Forget’ smart sensors. The bottleneck in achieving long-life sensors is the power supply. Nowi is developing energy harvesting and power management technology to solve this problem. The company was founded over 2 years ago, has grown to 12 people, received numerous innovation awards and has filed several patents. During this graduation assignment, you will have the opportunity to experience and contribute to a fast-moving tech start-up located in Delft.

www.nowi-energy.com

In most of energy management systems, an energy converter is used to transform voltage and current to fit load requirements. An energy storage cell is used to store the converted energy and supply the load. However, conventional energy storage cells have current leakage that prevents long-term energy storage and loss of initial energy storage. The loss of initial energy storage consists of partial self-discharge of the energy cell immediately after the charging source is disconnected from the energy cell. In the energy harvesting scenario, this leads to loss of harvested energy, which causes efficiency degradation.

Assignment

Research questions that form the basis of this assignment:

  • How are the long-term losses and the initial losses modeled in a super-capacitor and rechargeable battery? Is this model complete and accurate?
  • What is the life cycle of a super-cap vs. battery?
  • Is it possible to use metal oxide capacitors to mitigate leakage?
  • How many F/um^2 can we reach with low leakage in an integrated technology?
  • Can we mitigate leakage using typical standard energy cell using series and or parallel circuits?
  • How can we balance the charge across capacitors using electronics while we do not increase leakage current?
  • Contact

    prof.dr.ir. Wouter Serdijn

    Bioelectronics Group

    Department of Microelectronics

    Last modified: 2021-01-11