IFAC PapersOnLine 51-6 (2018) 432–437 ScienceDirect Available online at www.sciencedirect.com 2405-8963 © 2018, IFAC (International Federation of Automatic Control) Hosting by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Peer review under responsibility of International Federation of Automatic Control. 10.1016/j.ifacol.2018.07.115 © 2018, IFAC (International Federation of Automatic Control) Hosting by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Keywords: Energy management, energy harvesting, AEM10940 circuit, MPPT, solar cell, embedded systems. 1. INTRODUCTION Currently, the new technologies are still developed and deployed. As an example, the IoT progressive technology can be mentioned. The need of data gathering, communications and data processing brings a new challenges together with the new devices and systems (e.g. embedded systems). On the other hand, there are of course also the new problems and shortcomings. One of the key issues, the power supply such devices is. There are various types of accumulators and batteries in many embodiments. However, their lifetime is limited. One solution of this issue is so-called energy harvesting (Wang et al., 2018 b). Energy harvesting or power harvesting deals with gathering of energy from new alternative and renewable sources, its storage and power supply of electronic equipment. It is often used for obtaining a small piece of energy from environment and power supply of low-power devices, e.g. modern sensors, low-power radio transmitters or wireless communication respectively, in applications with limited or unavailable possibilities of energy sources, (Almasyova et al., 2017). The typical power sources for energy harvesting are solar radiation, ambient temperature, vibration, RF smog, etc. These kinds of energy must be transformed to the electrical energy using energy harvesters and then stored in the accumulators, i.e. batteries, capacitors or super-capacitors. The fundamental block scheme of the whole energy harvesting system is in the Fig. 1. The energy harvesting system includes some energy harvester, conversion circuit, energy storage and electronic load. The control and management of this system is realized using the circuits called energy management circuits. They are used for management of power supply, energy storage and flow of energy between individual components (Liu et al. 2016). Fig. 1. The fundamental block scheme of energy harvesting system (Kingatua, 2016) 2. ENERGY SOURCES AND ENERGY HARVESTERS As stated in the previous chapter, the physical variables, which are typically used for energy harvesting, are solar radiation, ambient temperature, vibration or RF smog. These quantities are used as an energy source that must be transformed to the electrical energy based on different physical principles. This transform provides various energy harvesters, e.g. solar cells (or photovoltaic panels - PV), thermoelectric generators (TEG), piezoelectric sensors, RF receivers, etc. (Visconti et al., 2016), (Khemar et al., 2018). The usage of individual principles and harvesters depends on the particular application and environment. Another important parameter of choosing the energy harvester is its effectivity that is given by the principle, size of harvester and ambient conditions. The typical values of effectivity for ordinary sources are shown in Tab. 1 (Donovan, 2017). Based on this information, the outdoor light and the thermal energy can be evaluated as the most effective sources for energy harvesting. Abstract: The goal of this paper is to present the possibilities of energy harvesting using the modern components called energy management systems. These circuits are integral parts of modern energy harvesting systems and are responsible for management of power supply, energy storage and flow of energy between individual components. This paper focuses on the E-PEAS AEM10940 circuit. It is a small device usable for low power embedded systems. Thus, its basic characteristic and properties obtained by repeated short-term and long-term measurements are presented and evaluated. * Department of Control and Instrumentation, Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Communication, Brno University of Technology, Technicka 3082/12, 616 00 Brno, Czech Republic *(e-mail: jirgl@feec.vutbr.cz), **(e-mail: bradac@feec.vutbr.cz), ***(e-mail: fiedler@feec.vutbr.cz) M. Jirgl*. Z. Bradac**. P. Fiedler***. Testing the E-PEAS Energy Management circuit for Embedded Systems