Abstract

This study presents the performance evaluation a developed energy harvesting interface circuit in active technique. The energy harvesting interface circuit for micro-power applications uses equivalent voltage of the piezoelectric materials have been developed and simulated. Circuit designs and simulation results are presented for a conventional diode rectifier with voltage doubler in passive technique. Most of the existing techniques are mainly passive-based energy harvesting circuits. Generally, the power harvesting capability of the passive technique is very low. To increase the harvested energy, the active technique and its components such as MOSFET, thyristor and transistor have chosen to design the proposed energy harvesting interface circuit. In this study, it has simulated both the conventional in passive circuit and developed energy harvester in active technique. The developed interface circuits consisting of piezoelectric element with input source of vibration, AC-DC thyristor doubler rectifier circuit and DC-DC boost converter using thyristor with storage device. In the development circuits, it is noted that the components thyristor instead of mainly diode available in conventional circuits have chosen. Because the forward voltage potential (0.7 V) is higher than the incoming input voltage (0.2 V). Finally, the complete energy harvester using PSPICE software have designed and simulated. The proposed circuits in PSPICE generate the boost-up DC voltage up to 2 V. The overall efficiency of the developed circuit is 70%, followed by the software simulation, which is greater than conventional circuit efficiency of 20% in performance evaluator. It is concluded that the developed circuit output voltage can be used to operate for the applications in autonomous devices.

Keywords:

AC-DC rectifier, autonomous devices, DC-DC boost converter, energy harvesting, piezoelectric element,

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Competing interests

The authors have no competing interests.

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