Due to the current trend of urbanization more people will come and live in cities than ever before. This increases the need to monitor the urban environment, to be able to improve the living conditions of the urban dwellers. Our project combines the need to monitor the local environment, with a portable, self-powered and wireless weather station. The final design consists of a solar powered and WiFi-connected weather station with autonomous functionality for one year. For our research, the focus was on the Netherlands. Part of such a project is the power management which will be dealt with in this thesis.
In the thesis, different maximum power point tracking algorithms will be discussed and compared. Furthermore, some more research is done in the hardware design, the use of different evaluation boards and battery configurations. Finally, a prototype using the incremental conductance algorithm is constructed and tested. Simulations lead to an efficiency of around 80%, which means autonomous functionality for a minimum of one year. The physical system had a lower efficiency, but autonomous functionality for one year was still achieved.