Three-Phase Powerline Energy Harvesting Circuit with Maximum Power Point Tracking and Cold Start-Up

This paper presents a three-phase powerline energy harvesting circuit with doubly regulated output voltages to power wireless sensors for the monitoring of railroad powerline status. Three ring-shaped silicon steel cores coupled to the three phases of a powerline convert the line current into three-phase voltages, which are applied to an energy harvesting circuit. The key parts of the circuit are a series three-phase voltage rectifier, a buck–boost converter operating in discontinuous conduction mode (DCM), and a microcontroller unit (MCU) for maximum power point tracking (MPPT). The MCU performs two-step MPPT, coarse and fine, for impedance matching based on the perturb and observe method. Two parallel voltage regulators deliver 5 V and 5.7 V regulated DC voltages to power a radio and a set of sensors, respectively. The energy harvesting circuit is prototyped using commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) components on an FR4 PCB. The measured maximum efficiency is 84% for the three-phase voltage rectifier and 89% for the buck–boost converter under the powerline current ranging from 5 A to 20 A.