Electrical Interfacing Circuit Discussion of Galloping-based Piezoelectric Energy Harvester

AbstractThe equivalent circuit and electrical interfacing circuit of agalloping-based piezoelectric flag energy harvester is discussed and the nonlinear synchronized switching technique is used to increase the power.Energy harvesting from ambient is highly focused and by using a cantilever beam to convert the vibration energy is the most popular topics. Except using cantilever beam, piezoelectric flag or plate converted the flow energy has been widely invested. As the interfacing circuit is the important design part to increase the power output, in this paper,several interfacing circuit including standard DC approach, SSHI technique and transformer-based SSHI technique are proposed and compared. Simulations and experimental results show the optimal interfacing circuit in piezoelectric flow energy harveste

Self-Powered Electronics for Piezoelectric Energy Harvesting Devices

International audienc

System-level coupled modeling of piezoelectric vibration energy harvesting systems by joint finite element and circuit analysis

A practical piezoelectric vibration energy harvesting (PVEH) system is usually composed of two coupled parts: a harvesting structure and an interface circuit. Thus, it is much necessary to build system-level coupled models for analyzing PVEH systems, so that the whole PVEH system can be optimized to obtain a high overall efficiency. In this paper, two classes of coupled models are proposed by joint finite element and circuit analysis. The first one is to integrate the equivalent circuit model of the harvesting structure with the interface circuit and the second one is to integrate the equivalent electrical impedance of the interface circuit into the finite element model of the harvesting structure. Then equivalent circuit model parameters of the harvesting structure are estimated by finite element analysis and the equivalent electrical impedance of the interface circuit is derived by circuit analysis. In the end, simulations are done to validate and compare the proposed two classes of system-level coupled models. The results demonstrate that harvested powers from the two classes of coupled models approximate to theoretic values. Thus, the proposed coupled models can be used for system-level optimizations in engineering applications

Synchronous charge extraction and voltage inversion (SCEVI): a new efficient vibration-based energy harvesting scheme

This paper presents a new interface technique called synchronous charge extraction and voltage inversion (SCEVI), which consists of a synchronous inductor and a buck-boost converter for vibration-based energy harvesting using piezoelectric elements. The theoretical calculation of the harvested power obtained by using such a technique are proposed and compared with the so-called Standard, SECE (Synchronous Electric Charge Extraction), Parallel-SSHI (Parallel Synchronized Switch Harvesting on Inductor) and Series-SSHI (Series Synchronized Switch Harvesting on Inductor) methods commonly used in piezoelectric vibration-powered generator considering both constant displacement amplitude and force amplitude. From the harvested power point of view, SCEVI and Parallel – SSHI techniques are the better ones and each has its own merits. But the harvested power of SCEVI is independent of the load connected to the generator and Parallel – SSHI depend on the load resistance. The harvested power of SECE is also independent of the load, but the further experimental results show that the proposed SCEVI interface technique dramatically increases the harvested power by almost up to 150 % compared with the SECE method under the same amplitude of displacement excitation

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. Gljušcic, E. Kamenar and Ž. Vrcan is partly enabled by using the equipment funded via the EU European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) project no. RC.2.2.06-0001: “Research Infrastructure for Campus-based Laboratories at the University of Rijeka (RISK)” and partly supported by the University of Rijeka, Croatia, project uniri-tehnic-18-32 „Advanced mechatronics devices for smart technological solutions“. Z. Hadas, P. Tofel and O. Ševecek acknowledge the support provided via the Czech Science Foundation project GA19-17457S „Manufacturing and analysis of flexible piezoelectric layers for smart engineering”. 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

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

A Cold-Startup SSHI Rectifier for Piezoelectric Energy Harvesters with Increased Open-Circuit Voltage

Piezoelectric vibration energy harvesting has drawn much research interest over the last decade towards the goal of enabling self-sustained wireless sensor nodes. In order to make use of the harvested energy, interface circuits are needed to rectify and manage the energy. Among all active interface circuits, SSHI (synchronized switch harvesting on inductor) and SECE (synchronous electric charge extraction) are widely employed due to their high energy efficiencies. However, the cold-startup issue still remains since an interface circuit needs a stable DC supply and the whole system is completely out of charge at the beginning of implementations or after a certain period of time without input vibration excitation. In this paper, a new cold-startup SSHI interface circuit is presented, which dynamically increases the open-circuit voltage generated from the piezoelectric transducer (PT) in cold-state to start the system under much lower excitation levels. The proposed circuit is designed and fabricated in a 0.18 um CMOS process and experimentally validated together with a custom MEMS (microelectromechanical systems) harvester, which is designed with split electrodes to work with the proposed power extraction circuit. The experiments were performed to start the system from the cold state under variable excitation levels. The results show that the proposed system lowers the required excitation level by at least 50% in order to perform a cold-startup. This aids restarting of the energy harvesting system under low excitation levels each time it enters the cold state