Active Energy Harvesting on Piezoelectric Materials: Experimental Demonstration and Standalone Circuit Implementation
Open Access
Author:
Tian, Geng
Graduate Program:
Electrical Engineering
Degree:
Master of Science
Document Type:
Master Thesis
Date of Defense:
July 16, 2008
Committee Members:
Heath Hofmann, Thesis Advisor/Co-Advisor
Keywords:
Power Electronics Active Energy Harvesting Piezoelectric PVDF
Abstract:
The need for wireless remote sensors is a fast increasing trend in many industries.
The sensors need to survive without maintenance for long periods of time or indefinitely,
especially for those placed in inaccessible locations. Energy harvesting
using piezoelectric devices is a possible solution to this problem. There are two
types of energy harvesting approaches; namely, passive and active. The passive
methods are well established and have already been put into new sensor product
by some companies, but the performance of the passive method is much lower than
the energy potential of the piezoelectric devices.
The active energy harvest idea, which was proposed and systematically
studied by Dr. Yiming Liu, increases the efficiency of energy harvesting
dramatically. However, instead of using a practical low-power standalone circuit
to support his ideas, he performed the experiment by using a microcontroller with
very high power consumption which is thousands times higher than the power generation
capacity of the piezoelectric materials.
In this thesis, an improved active energy harvesting core interface is developed
and the supporting standalone circuit with ultra-low power consumption is proposed.
The piezoelectric PVDF is used for energy harvesting, it provides much higher power than the single-crystal material used in [2] when utilizing a multilayer configuration. The harvested power achieved under this approach was up to 27mW at 1.4% strain, and the power consumption of the standalone active circuit
was only 1.4mW.
