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An Efficient Inductorless Dynamically Configured Interface Circuit for Piezoelectric Vibration Energy Harvesting

Accepted version
Peer-reviewed

Type

Article

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Abstract

Vibration energy harvesting based on piezoelectric materials is of interest in several applications such as in powering remote distributed wireless sensor nodes for structural health monitoring. Synchronized switch harvesting on inductor and synchronous electric charge extraction circuits show good power efficiency among reported power management circuits; however, limitations exist due to inductors employed, adaption of response to varying excitation levels, and the synchronized switch damping (SSD) effect. In this paper, an inductorless dynamically configured interface circuit is proposed, which is able to configure the connection of two piezoelectric materials in parallel or in series by periodically evaluating the ambient excitation level. The proposed circuit is designed and fabricated in a 0.35 μHV CMOS process.The fabricated circuit is cointegrated with a piezoelectric bimorph energy harvester and the performance is experimentally validated. With a low power consumption (0.5 μW), the measured results show that the proposed rectifier can provide a 4.5 × boost in harvested energy compared to the conventional full-bridge rectifier without employing an inductor. It also shows a high power efficiency over a wide range of excitation levels and is less susceptible to SSD.

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Journal Title

IEEE Transactions on Power Electronics

Conference Name

Journal ISSN

0885-8993
1941-0107

Volume Title

32

Publisher

IEEE
Sponsorship
EPSRC (EP/K000314/1)
EPSRC (EP/L010917/1)