Solar Cell Battery Charger

• Houssain Youssfi
• Rozina Gezahne
• Farid Elbouakriri
• Sanjay A

There are many battery chargers that are currently available in the market which can harvest electricity from solar cells. However, these battery chargers have not been able to capture the imagination of the people because of four main reasons, namely reliability, performance, cost and size. The goal of our projects is to build a battery charger that addresses these challenges. We have designed a battery charger that uses thermo-photo-voltaic cells. These cells are extremely small compared to the solar cells currently available in the market. They also have better performance with efficiency up to 30%. The unique feature of these cells is that, they can harvest energy from both solar and heat sources. So, they can function both outdoors as well as indoors. This feature is extremely important and improves the reliability of the battery charger. The battery charger also features high capacity rechargeable lithium-ion battery that can easily recharge batteries up to 5000mah. The electronics of the battery charger uses LTC 3105 which is a step-up DC to DC converter with maximum-power-point-control to improve the performance of the battery charger. TPV cells are currently very expensive; however, they provide better efficiency and performance and are much smaller in size. We believe that this protype if successful can be incorporated into consumer electronics and become standard feature for these products in future.