Dedicated Multi-element Electronic System for Personalized Protective Thermally Active Clothing

B. Pękosławski, P. Marciniak, Ł. Starzak, A. Stawiński (Lodz Univ. of Techn., Poland), G. Bartkowiak (Central Inst. for Labour Protection - National Research Inst., Poland)

An active heating system has been developed for application in smart clothing for mountain rescuers. It uses a set of sensors and is aimed at gathering necessary data for the elaboration and testing of the automatic control algorithm. The system is powered from a Li-ion battery pack, which can be additionally charged from flexible PV modules. The paper presents the estimation of system power requirements and its energy budget. Since the system maximum operation time strongly depends on the efficiency of its main voltage converter, the design of the latter was based on a model enabling power loss estimation in the particular components. Characteristics ultimately measured on a prototype showed a high agreement with simulations.