Power Electronics

The day is coming when electric vehicles (EVs) land, water and airborne are as much as 80% electronics and electrics if we include the power components.

The winners of the IDTechEx Energy Harvesting and Wireless Sensor Networks Awards were announced at the 5th annual conference and exhibition in Berlin, Germany on Wednesday the 17th of April during the keynote sessions.

The days when piezoelectric energy harvesting was considered unreliable and had low power output are long gone. Hand in hand with the development of ultra low power electronics, energy harvesters have been drastically improving also.

For the first time in this year's event in Washington DC on the 7th and 8th of November, a third event, focusing on supercapacitor technologies will be co-located, highlighting the advances, applications and adoption trends in this closely related field.

Starting with more humble killer applications such as meter reading in buildings, WSN will grow rapidly from $0.58 billion in 2012 to $2.4 billion in 2022 according to IDTechEx research.

The toolkit of technologies that energy harvesting and wireless sensors are making available, are enabling system integrators to come up with solutions in a variety of vertical markets.

Zero power wireless sensors are now available, which bring together new low power wireless ICs with energy harvesters (which harvest energy from heat, light or motion, for example) and the appropriate form of energy storage and conditioning.

This year, the world's largest event on printed electronics, "printed Electronics USA" will reflect the widening government support for printed electronics. Beyond the burgeoning programs at universities and government research centers, this is particularly evident in military and electric vehicle work. The US Army reflects this in two presentations. One is an overview of materials printing capabilities and prototype development for US Army applications and the other concerns direct write approaches to nanoscale electronics.

In 2011, IDTechEx research finds that the amount of money spent on energy harvesters will be $0.7Bn, with several hundred developers involved throughout the value chain.

The judges noted very innovative and impressive features with real benefits for electric vehicles.