Abstract
Piezoelectric components offer several potential advantages to power conversion including high power density and efficiency capabilities compared to magnetics at small scales. Converter architectures have been developed for efficient utilization of piezoelectrics, but without fundamental criteria for designing the piezoelectric components themselves. In this article, we derive figures of merit for the achievable efficiencies and power handling densities of piezoelectric materials and vibration modes based on realistic utilization in a power converter. These figures of merit are likewise accompanied by geometry conditions that serve as guidelines for high-efficiency high-power-density piezoelectric resonator design. We demonstrate use of these metrics to evaluate commercially available PZT and lithium niobate materials across seven vibration modes, and we validate the figures of merit and geometry conditions with numerical solutions of converter operation and experimental results. The proposed figures of merit are concluded to be highly representative metrics for the capabilities of piezoelectrics in power conversion, and these capabilities are shown to have favorable scaling properties for converter miniaturization.
Highlights
Magnetic energy storage elements such as inductors and transformers pose fundamental limits to miniaturization for power electronics; as magnetics scale to smaller sizes, their power density and efficiency capabilities inherently decrease [2], [3]
The promise of power conversion based on only piezoelectric energy storage is evident in magnetic-less converter designs realized in [5]–[10] with single-port piezoelectric resonators (PRs) and in [11]–[18] with multi-port piezoelectric transformers (PTs)
Useful power density metrics must consider how the PR is to be utilized in a converter, so we again assume the amplitude of resonance model in
Summary
Magnetic energy storage elements such as inductors and transformers pose fundamental limits to miniaturization for power electronics; as magnetics scale to smaller sizes, their power density and efficiency capabilities inherently decrease [2], [3]. This motivates exploration of power conversion based on other energy storage technologies that may be more conducive to miniaturization. In addition to material and vibration mode selection, these FOM derivations aid PR geometry design and elucidate fundamental power handling scaling properties for PRs in realistic converter implementations.
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