Zollner Elektronik AG Human Resources Director Xaver Huber awarded the prize on January 31st, 2020 at the Deggendorf Institute of Technology (DIT) graduation ceremony.
In the “Internet of Things”, IoT for short, intelligent devices communicate with each other. And their numbers are heavily increasing today; some 25 billion devices should exist in coming years. Their power comes from lithium-ion batteries, which cannot easily be recharged from a wall socket because the IoT devices are constantly moving around the world. Lithium is also in short supply and its extraction and production are problematic from an environmental aspect. That is why Energy Harvesting should make batteries superfluous for mobile IoT devices: special network circuits convert even the weakest energy quantities into stable supply voltage.
Just how these types of network circuits will look was studied in depth by Andreas Federl in his Masters Thesis entitled “Digitally Configurable Battery Charging System”. He designed, built, tested and categorized various circuit types as power supplies. This developed into a research project on the topic of Energy Harvesting. Of course, Andreas is continuing his scientific research at DIT: he has been a visiting lecturer at the School of Electrotechnology and Media Technology since the winter semester of 2019.
Author: Jutta Schreiner (MSMC)
