A Self-Bias-Flip With Charge Recycle Interface Circuit With No External Energy Reservoir for Piezoelectric Energy Harvesting Array

Abstract

This paper presents a piezoelectric energy harvesting (PEH) interface circuit using a new self-bias-flip with charge recycle (SBFR) technique without employing any additional energy reservoir. Traditional designs, including synchronous-switch harvesting on inductor (SSHI), synchronous-switch harvesting on capacitor (SSHC), synchronous electric charge extraction (SECE), etc., require additional capacitors or inductors to reverse the voltage on the PEH at the zero-crossing point. This design innovatively uses the inherent capacitors of the piezoelectric harvesters as the flipping capacitors. In order to improve the extract efficiency of the interface, the zero-crossing state is split into charge recycle stage and voltage-flip stage. For a piezoelectric array with <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$2^{n}$</tex-math></inline-formula> PEHs, a configuration with (n-1) phases in the charge recycle stage is adopted to reduce the loss caused by direct charge neutralization. The charge redistribution loss is reduced by employing (2n+1) phases in the voltage-flip stage. The proposed principle has been implemented with discrete components and is verified by 3 different prototypes. The measurement results show that a flipping efficiency of 67% is achieved by utilizing SBFR with 4 PEHs. And the proposed interface can provide up to 5.2x improvement when compared with the full-bridge rectifier (FBR).