10.17863/CAM.9827
Du, Sijun
0000-0001-6238-4423
Jia, Yu
Seshia, Ashwin
0000-0001-9305-6879
An Efficient Inductor-less Dynamically Configured Interface Circuit for Piezoelectric Vibration Energy Harvesting
Apollo - University of Cambridge Repository (staging)
2016
energy harvesting
piezoelectric transducer
rectifier
power conditioning
Apollo - University of Cambridge Repository (staging)
Apollo - University of Cambridge Repository (staging)
2016-07-07
Article
0885-8993
1941-0107
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 (SSHI) and Synchronous Electric Charge Extraction (SECE) 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 inductor-less 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 µm HV CMOS process.The fabricated circuit is co-integrated 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.
Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council
This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from IEEE via http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/TPEL.2016.2587757