Micropower Design of a Fully Autonomous Energy Harvesting Circuit for Arrays of Piezoelectric Transducers

This paper presents a self-powered energy harvesting circuit based on synchronous charge extraction with a single shared inductor for power conversion from arrays of independent piezoelectric transducers. The number of handled elements can be easily increased at the expense of few additional components and without affecting performance. The energy harvesting circuit was characterized with three 0.5×12.7×31.8 mm3 piezoelectric cantilevers subject to different types of vibrations. Throughout all operating conditions, the circuit was able to extract the maximum power independently from every transducer. Compared to passive energy harvesting interfaces, the output power is significantly higher, with worst-case increases ranging from +75% to +184%. The circuit starts up passively and is based on ultralow power active control, which consumes during operation at 3 V a fraction of the extra harvested power as low as 10 uW per source. As part of the best tradeoff between harvested and intrinsic power, an overall energy efficiency up to 74% was achieved.