Study and development of high voltage energy harvesting and storage power-pack for indoor application

Study and development of high voltage energy harvesting and storage power-pack for indoor application The last decades have been characterized by a massive population growth which induced a global increase in energy demand. As a matter of fact, energy supply plays a great role in ensuring us a good quality of life. Until now fossil fuels have covered most of our energy needs, but this trend cannot go on for a long time yet. In fact, fossil resources progressive extinction and their dramatic environmental impact, combined with nuclear power safety and waste management concerns, have led to a widespread interest in renewable energies exploitation. Among renewable resources, solar energy plays a key role because of the huge amount of power we receive every year to the earth's surface in the form of sunlight. At this point the challenge becomes to convert light energy into electrical energy and furthermore to store and distribute it. The aim of this master thesis was to build a energy harvesting and storage power-pack system made up of a photovoltaic module (6 series-connected dye-sensitized solar cells), built by the author at DISAT labs. (Polytechinc University of Turin, Italy), and a commercial supercapacitor (by AVX BestCap). A dye-sensitized solar cell (DSSC) is a particular type of third generation solar cell whose operating principle is inspired by chlorophyll photosynthesis. In the present work we have a module made up of six series-connected DSSCs (in a "W-type" configuration). It shows an efficiency of 3.19% and FF= 0.53 under one sun illumination condition which can be boosted to η = 3,95%. Under indoor illumination conditions (250 lux) using a LED lamp as the light source, the module showed an efficiency of 10.12% which is one of the highest values reported in literature.