Dc'sign of Piezoelectric Energy Harvesting and Supercnpacitor Charging Circuits Using Optimized Duty-Cycle of Buck Converter
Abstract
Energy harvesting has been proved to be an innovative solution to replace the
batteries in remote power supply applications. Unfortunately, the limited capacity
aucl low efficiency of power conversion restrict the practical applications of energy
harvesting in daily-life. After a systematic review of research on energy harvesting
iu power management perspective, a circuit design, which targets low-frequency
mechanical vibrations, is presented. With the classical piezoelectric cantilever setup,
the maximum charging current of a supercapacitor can be obtained by optimizing the
duty-cycle of a buck converter through software implemented pulse width modulation.
The results of experiments prove the capacitive electric model of the piezoelectric
element, the existence of maximum charging current of the supercapacitor, and the
adaptive control of the designed circuits. With the duty-cycle optimized to 2.17%, a
maximum charging current of 17.36 mA is measured, which is approximately 4 times
that obtained in related researches. An active radio frequency identification (RFID)
application is proposed to utilize the harvested power of 67.2 µW. In addition, the
digital design in field programmable gate array (FPGA) is integrated using AMIS
0.5 µrn CMOS process technology to reduce system power dissipation.