Design and implementation of an energy harvester interface circuit using ultra-low power piezo bending generator

Abstract

This paper presents design and implementations of energy harvesting interface circuit (EHIC) utilizing ultra-low power (ULP) piezo-bending generator PBG to run micro-devices. Conventionally, energy harvesting (EH) devices produce low energy thus incapable to load interface with multiple applications. It is therefore support electronic drives are needed to compensate and match the load demand. In this study, an active technique electronic drives is designed and implemented for energy harvester that consists of full-wave MOSFET bridge rectifier circuit, low pass filter, step-up converter with regulator and temporary storage device. The proposed technique is simulated using PSPICE software and comparisons were made to the conventional technique on the output side. The results show that the performance of proposed technique is better than the conventional technique in terms of the output voltage. The proposed active technique generates an output up to 2.3V whereas the conventional step-up converter generates an output of 0.42V. The proposed model EHIC simulation is run in PSPICE and implemented onto prototype board to verify the functionality. The integrated EHIC is able to generate maximum output of 1.612V from an input of 0.7V. This corresponds to the overall efficiency of developed hardware to be greater than 74%.