Energy Harvesting and Management in Intermittently Powered Systems
Summary
Intermittently powered systems harness ambient energy—from light, vibration, thermal gradients or radio-frequency sources—to operate without conventional batteries. Such devices often rely on small capacitors or supercapacitors to buffer harvested energy, leading to brief power outages whenever the input falls below consumption. Effective management of this intermittent supply demands a holistic approach that spans hardware design, power-aware circuit techniques, adaptive software scheduling and predictive algorithms. Key challenges include matching capacitor size to task requirements, preserving system state across power failures and dynamically adapting sensing or communication schedules to energy availability. Advances in transient computing and energy-aware protocols have enabled significant improvements in duty cycling, task granularity and system resilience, paving the way for truly self-sustaining Internet of Things deployments in remote or inaccessible environments.
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Energy Harvesting and Management in Intermittently Powered Systems publication trend
The graph below shows the total number of articles in energy harvesting and management in intermittently powered systems across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).
Technical terms
Energy harvesting: Conversion of ambient physical energy into electrical power for device operation without batteries.
Intermittently powered system: A device whose supply voltage fluctuates or drops to zero when harvested energy is insufficient, causing frequent reboot cycles.
Supercapacitor: A high-capacitance energy buffer that stores charge electrostatically for rapid charge/discharge cycles.
Transient computing: A computing paradigm that allows tasks to span across power failures by checkpointing state in non-volatile memory.
State-of-charge extrema prediction: Forecasting the maximum and minimum charge levels of an energy buffer to optimise task scheduling and prevent saturation or depletion.
References
- RESTOP: Retaining External Peripheral State in Intermittently-Powered Sensor Systems. Sensors (2018).
- Selective policies for efficient state retention in transiently-powered embedded systems: Exploiting properties of NVM technologies. Sustainable Computing Informatics and Systems (2019).
- EmRep: Energy management relying on state‐of‐charge extrema prediction. IET Computers & Digital Techniques (2021).
- Ultra-Low-Power Circuits for Intermittent Communication. Journal of Low Power Electronics and Applications (2022).
- Stash: Flexible Energy Storage for Intermittent Sensors. ACM Transactions on Embedded Computing Systems (2024).
- Adaptive Transmissions for Batteryless Periodic Sensing. IoT (2024).
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