Mathematical Modeling and Validation of Saturating and Clampable Cascaded Magnetics for Magnetic Energy Harvesting

Electromagnetic energy harvesting extracts energy from magnetic fields and can provide power to sensors, monitoring nodes, cyber-physical systems and control elements without additional battery and external power source and wiring. This article presents a novel ac-driven electromagnetic energy harvester based on periodically saturating, cascaded magnetics, consisting of a clampable magnetic core and an ungapped high permeability core. The high permeability core guarantees the maximum energy extraction, whereas the clampable core enables the nonintrusive installation of the energy harvester for more pervasive applications. This article first builds a comprehensive mathematical model based on this saturating cascaded magnetic structure, considering the reachability of an individual saturation flux density of the two magnetic cores. This model resolves the new challenges introduced by the cascaded magnetics with respect to a traditional single-core case, providing the accurate calculation of the lengths of the relevant time windows for harvesting and the amount of the harvested power. Our mathematical model is verified against simulation and experiment, showing excellent agreement among them with the maximum discrepancy of less than 6%. This article also reveals that the maximum power extraction occurs when the ungapped core operates in its slightly saturated state and that the harvested power increases with a higher primary current as well as a higher line frequency.