71 research outputs found
Self-Powered Electronics for Piezoelectric Energy Harvesting Devices
International audienc
Rectification, amplification and switching capabilities for energy harvesting systems: power management circuit for piezoelectric energy harvester
Dissertação de mestrado em Biomedical EngineeringA new energy mechanism needs to be addressed to overcome the battery dependency, and consequently extend
Wireless Sensor Nodes (WSN) lifetime effectively. Energy Harvesting is a promising technology that can fulfill
that premise. This work consists of the realization of circuit components employable in a management system for
a piezoelectric-based energy harvester, with low power consumption and high efficiency. The implementation of
energy harvesting systems is necessary to power-up front-end applications without any battery. The input power
and voltage levels generated by the piezoelectric transducer are relatively low, especially in small-scale systems,
as such extra care has to be taken in power consumption and efficiency of the circuits.
The main contribution of this work is a system capable of amplifying, rectifying and switching the unstable
signal from an energy harvester source. The circuit components are designed based on 0.13 Complementary
Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor (CMOS) technology.
An analog switch, capable of driving the harvesting circuit at a frequency between 1 and 1 , with
proper temperature behaviour, is designed and verified. An OFF resistance of 520.6 Ω and isolation of
â111.24 , grant excellent isolation to the circuit.
The designed voltage amplifier is capable of amplifying a minor signal with a gain of 42.56 , while requiring
low power consumption. The output signal is satisfactorily amplified with a reduced offset voltage of 8 .
A new architecture of a two-stage active rectifier is proposed. The power conversion efficiency is 40.4%, with
a voltage efficiency of up to 90%. Low power consumption of 17.7 is achieved by the rectifier, with the
embedded comparator consuming 113.9 .
The outcomes validate the circuitâs power demands, which can be used for other similar applications in biomedical,
industrial, and commercial fields.Para combater a dependĂȘncia dos dispositivos eletrĂłnicos relativamente ĂĄs baterias Ă© necessĂĄrio um novo sistema
energĂ©tico, que permita prolongar o tempo de vida Ăștil dos mesmos. Energy Harvesting Ă© uma tecnologia
promissora utilizada para alimentar dispositivos sem bateria. Este trabalho consiste na realização de componentes
empregåveis num circuito global para extrair energia a partir ds vibraçÔes de um piezoelétricos com baixo
consumo de energia e alta eficiĂȘncia. Os nĂveis de potĂȘncia e voltagem gerados pelo transdutor piezoelĂ©trico sĂŁo
relativamente baixos, especialmente em sistemas de pequena escala, por isso requerem cuidado extra relativamente
ao consumo de energia e eficiĂȘncia dos circuitos.
A principal contribuição deste trabalho é um sistema apropriado para amplificar, retificar e alternar o sinal
instĂĄvel proveniente de uma fonte de energy harvesting. Os componentes do sistema sĂŁo implementados com
base na tecnologia CMOS com 0.13 .
Um interruptor analĂłgico capaz de modelar a frequĂȘncia do sinal entre 1 e 1 e estĂĄvel perante
variaçÔes de temperatura, Ă© implementado. O circuito tem um excelente isolamento de â111.24 , devido a
uma resistĂȘncia OFF de 520.6 Ω.
O amplificador implementado Ă© apto a amplificar um pequeno sinal com um ganho de 42.56 e baixo
consumo. O sinal de saĂda Ă© satisfatoriamente amplificado com uma voltagem de offset de 8 .
Um retificador ativo de dois estĂĄgios com uma nova arquitetura Ă© proposto. A eficiĂȘncia de conversĂŁo de
energia atinge os 40.4%, com uma eficiĂȘncia de voltagem atĂ© 90%. O retificador consome pouca energia, apenas
17.7 , incorporando um comparador de 113.9 .
Os resultados validam as exigĂȘncias energĂ©ticas do circuito, que pode ser usado para outras aplicaçÔes similares
no campo biomédico, industrial e comercial
Simulation and performance analysis of self-powered piezoelectric energy harvesting system for low power applications
Energy harvesting is a process of extracting energy from surrounding environments. The extracted energy is stored in the supply power for various applications like wearable, wireless sensor, and internet of thing (IoT) applications. The electricity generation using conventional approaches is very costly and causes more pollution in the environmental surroundings. In this manuscript, an energy-efficient, self-powered battery-less piezoelectric-based energy harvester (PE-EH) system is modeled using maximum power point tracking (MPPT) module. The MPPT is used to track the optimal voltage generated by the piezoelectric (PE) sensor and stored across the capacitor. The proposed PE system is self-operated without additional microarchitecture to harvest the Power. The experimental simulation results for the overall PE-EH systems are analyzed for different frequency ranges with variable input source vibrations. The optimal voltage storage across the storing capacitor varies from 1.12 to 1.6 V. The PE-EH system can harvest power up to 86 ”W without using any voltage source and is suitable for low-power applications. The proposed PE-EH module is compared with the existing similar EH system with better improvement in harvested power
In-Body Energy Harvesting Power Management Interface for Post Heart Transplantation Monitoring
Deep tissue energy harvesters are of increasing interest in the development of battery-less implantable devices. This paper presents a fully integrated ultra-low quiescent power management interface. It has power optimization and impedance matching between a piezoelectric energy harvester and the functional load that could be potentially powered by the heart's mechanical motions. The circuit has been designed in 0.18-”m CMOS technology. It dissipates 189.8 nW providing two voltage outputs of 1.4 V and 4.2 V. The simulation results show an output power 8.2x times of an ideal full-bridge rectifier without an external power supply. The design has the potential for use in self-powered heart implantable devices as it is capable providing stable output voltages from a cold startup
Analysis on One-Stage SSHC Rectifier for Piezoelectric Vibration Energy Harvesting
Conventional SSHI (synchronized switch harvesting on inductor) has been
believed to be one of the most efficient interface circuits for piezoelectric
vibration energy harvesting systems. It employs an inductor and the resulting
RLC loop to synchronously invert the charge across the piezoelectric material
to avoid charge and energy loss due to charging its internal capacitor ().
The performance of the SSHI circuit greatly depends on the inductor and a large
inductor is often needed; hence significantly increases the volume of the
system. An efficient interface circuit using a synchronous charge inversion
technique, named as SSHC, was proposed recently. The SSHC rectifier utilizes
capacitors, instead of inductors, to flip the voltage across the harvester. For
a one-stage SSHC rectifier, one single intermediate capacitor () is
employed to temporarily store charge flowed from and inversely charge
to perform the charge inversion. In previous studies, the voltage flip
efficiency achieves 1/3 when . This paper presents that the voltage
flip efficiency can be further increased to approach 1/2 if is chosen to
be much larger than
A Hybrid-Powered Wireless System for Multiple Biopotential Monitoring
Chronic diseases are the top cause of human death in the United States and worldwide. A huge amount of healthcare costs is spent on chronic diseases every year. The high medical cost on these chronic diseases facilitates the transformation from in-hospital to out-of-hospital healthcare. The out-of-hospital scenarios require comfortability and mobility along with quality healthcare. Wearable electronics for well-being management provide good solutions for out-of-hospital healthcare. Long-term health monitoring is a practical and effective way in healthcare to prevent and diagnose chronic diseases. Wearable devices for long-term biopotential monitoring are impressive trends for out-of-hospital health monitoring. The biopotential signals in long-term monitoring provide essential information for various human physiological conditions and are usually used for chronic diseases diagnosis.
This study aims to develop a hybrid-powered wireless wearable system for long-term monitoring of multiple biopotentials. For the biopotential monitoring, the non-contact electrodes are deployed in the wireless wearable system to provide high-level comfortability and flexibility for daily use. For providing the hybrid power, an alternative mechanism to harvest human motion energy, triboelectric energy harvesting, has been applied along with the battery to supply energy for long-term monitoring. For power management, an SSHI rectifying strategy associated with triboelectric energy harvester design has been proposed to provide a new perspective on designing TEHs by considering their capacitance concurrently. Multiple biopotentials, including ECG, EMG, and EEG, have been monitored to validate the performance of the wireless wearable system. With the investigations and studies in this project, the wearable system for biopotential monitoring will be more practical and can be applied in the real-life scenarios to increase the economic benefits for the health-related wearable devices
Piezoelectric Energy Harvesting: Enhancing Power Output by Device Optimisation and Circuit Techniques
Energy harvesting; that is, harvesting small amounts of energy from environmental
sources such as solar, air flow or vibrations using small-scale (â1cm
3
) devices, offers the
prospect of powering portable electronic devices such as GPS receivers and mobile
phones, and sensing devices used in remote applications: wireless sensor nodes, without
the use of batteries. Numerous studies have shown that power densities of energy
harvesting devices can be hundreds of ”W; however the literature also reveals that power
requirements of many electronic devices are in the mW range. Therefore, a key challenge
for the successful deployment of energy harvesting technology remains, in many cases,
the provision of adequate power. This thesis aims to address this challenge by
investigating two methods of enhancing the power output of a piezoelectric-based
vibration energy harvesting device. Cont/d
Energy harvesting technologies for structural health monitoring of airplane components - a review
With the aim of increasing the efficiency of maintenance and fuel usage in airplanes, structural health monitoring (SHM) of critical composite structures is increasingly expected and required. The optimized usage of this concept is subject of intensive work in the framework of the EU COST Action CA18203 "Optimising Design for Inspection" (ODIN). In this context, a thorough review of a broad range of energy harvesting (EH) technologies to be potentially used as power sources for the acoustic emission and guided wave propagation sensors of the considered SHM systems, as well as for the respective data elaboration and wireless communication modules, is provided in this work. EH devices based on the usage of kinetic energy, thermal gradients, solar radiation, airflow, and other viable energy sources, proposed so far in the literature, are thus described with a critical review of the respective specific power levels, of their potential placement on airplanes, as well as the consequently necessary power management architectures. The guidelines provided for the selection of the most appropriate EH and power management technologies create the preconditions to develop a new class of autonomous sensor nodes for the in-process, non-destructive SHM of airplane components.The work of S. Zelenika, P. GljuĆĄcic, E. Kamenar and Ćœ. Vrcan is partly enabled by using
the equipment funded via the EU European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) project no. RC.2.2.06-0001:
âResearch Infrastructure for Campus-based Laboratories at the University of Rijeka (RISK)â and partly supported
by the University of Rijeka, Croatia, project uniri-tehnic-18-32 âAdvanced mechatronics devices for smart
technological solutionsâ. Z. Hadas, P. Tofel and O. Ć evecek acknowledge the support provided via the Czech
Science Foundation project GA19-17457S âManufacturing and analysis of flexible piezoelectric layers for smart
engineeringâ. J. Hlinka, F. Ksica and O. Rubes gratefully acknowledge the financial support provided by the
ESIF, EU Operational Programme Research, Development and Education within the research project Center of
Advanced Aerospace Technology (Reg. No.: CZ.02.1.01/0.0/0.0/16_019/0000826) at the Faculty of Mechanical
Engineering, Brno University of Technology. V. Pakrashi would like to acknowledge UCD Energy Institute, Marine
and Renewable Energy Ireland (MaREI) centre Ireland, Strengthening Infrastructure Risk Assessment in the
Atlantic Area (SIRMA) Grant No. EAPA\826/2018, EU INTERREG Atlantic Area and Aquaculture Operations with
Reliable Flexible Shielding Technologies for Prevention of Infestation in Offshore and Coastal Areas (FLEXAQUA),
MarTera Era-Net cofund PBA/BIO/18/02 projects. The work of J.P.B. Silva is partially supported by the Portuguese
Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT) in the framework of the Strategic Funding UIDB/FIS/04650/2020.
M. Mrlik gratefully acknowledges the support of the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports of the Czech
Republic-DKRVO (RP/CPS/2020/003
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Energy-efficient Interfaces for Vibration Energy Harvesting
Ultra low power wireless sensors and sensor systems are of increasing interest in a variety of applications ranging from structural health monitoring to industrial process control. Electrochemical batteries have thus far remained the primary energy sources for such systems despite the finite associated lifetimes imposed due to limitations associated with energy density. However, certain applications (such as implantable biomedical electronic devices and tire pressure sensors) require the operation of sensors and sensor systems over significant periods of time, where battery usage may be impractical and add cost due to the requirement for periodic re-charging and/or replacement. In order to address this challenge and extend the operational lifetime of wireless sensors, there has been an emerging research interest on harvesting ambient vibration energy.
Vibration energy harvesting is a technology that generates electrical energy from ambient kinetic energy. Despite numerous research publications in this field over the past decade, low power density and variable ambient conditions remain as the key limitations of vibration energy harvesting. In terms of the piezoelectric transducers, the open-circuit voltage is usually low, which limits its power while extracted by a full-bridge rectifier. In terms of the interface circuits, most reported circuits are limited by the power efficiency, suitability to real-world vibration conditions and system volume due to large off-chip components required.
The research reported in this thesis is focused on increasing power output of piezoelectric transducers and power extraction efficiency of interface circuits. There are five main chapters describing two new design topologies of piezoelectric transducers and three novel active interface circuits implemented with CMOS technology. In order to improve the power output of a piezoelectric transducer, a series connection configuration scheme is proposed, which splits the electrode of a harvester into multiple equal regions connected in series to inherently increase the open-circuit voltage generated by the harvester. This topology passively increases the rectified power while using a full-bridge rectifier. While most of piezoelectric transducers are designed with piezoelectric layers fully covered by electrodes, this thesis proposes a new electrode design topology, which maximizes the raw AC output power of a piezoelectric harvester by finding an optimal electrode coverage.
In order to extract power from a piezoelectric harvester, three active interface circuits are proposed in this thesis. The first one improves the conventional SSHI (synchronized switch harvesting on inductor) by employing a startup circuitry to enable the system to start operating under much lower vibration excitation levels. The second one dynamically configures the connection of the two regions of a piezoelectric transducer to increase the operational range and output power under a variety of excitation levels. The third one is a novel SSH architecture which employs capacitors instead of inductors to perform synchronous voltage flip. This new architecture is named as SSHC (synchronized switch harvesting on capacitors) to distinguish from SSHI rectifiers and indicate its inductorless architecture
Piezoelectric vibration energy harvesting: A connection configuration scheme to increase operational range and output power
For a conventional monolithic piezoelectric transducer (PT) using a full-bridge rectifier, there is a threshold voltage that the open-circuit voltage measured across the PT must attain prior to any transfer of energy to the storage capacitor at the output of the rectifier. This threshold voltage usually depends on the voltage of the storage capacitor and the forward voltage drop of diodes. This article presents a scheme of splitting the electrode of a monolithic piezoelectric vibration energy harvester into multiple ( n) equal regions connected in series in order to provide a wider operating voltage range and higher output power while using a full-bridge rectifier as the interface circuit. The performance of different series stage numbers has been theoretically studied and experimentally validated. The number of series stages ([Formula: see text]) can be predefined for a particular implementation, which depends on the specified operating conditions, to achieve optimal performance. This enables the system to attain comparable performance compared to active interface circuits under an increased input range while no additional active circuits are required and the system is comparatively less affected by synchronized switching damping effect. </jats:p
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