ISSN 2319-5347, ISI Impact Factor: 0.763

VOLUME 03 NO. 02 APRIL 2015:

Title:          Performance evaluation and comparison of developed ULP energy harvester in active technique with conventional circuits in passive technique
Authors:    Mahidur R. Sarker, Azah Mohamed, Ramizi Mohamed
Abstract:   This paper presents the performance evaluation and comparison of developed Ultra-Low-Power (ULP) energy harvester in active technique with conventional circuits in passive technique. One of the most widely used energy harvesting techniques for micro-power applications uses piezoelectric materials. The materials convert vibrational energy to electrical energy. The interface circuits between the piezoelectric device and micro power devices play an important role in the energy harvesting process. Most of the previous 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, we have chosen the active technique and its components such as MOSFET, thyristor and transistor to design our proposed energy harvester system. In this paper, we have simulated both the conventional in passive circuit, and developed ULP energy harvester in active technique. The developed ULP circuits consisting of piezoelectric element with input source of vibration, ACDC MOSFET bridge full-wave rectifier circuit, voltage regulator and DC-DC step-up (boost-up) converter using thyristor with storage device. In our development circuits, it is noted that we have chosen the components MOSFET instead of mainly diode available in conventional circuits. Because the forward voltage potential
(0.7V) is higher than the incoming input voltage (0.3V). We have also designed voltage regulator circuit using MOSFET and op amp components to stabilise the rectified DC voltage. Finally, we have designed and simulated the complete energy harvester using PSPICE software. Our proposed circuits in PSPICE generate the boost-up DC voltage up to 1.67V. In the hardware implementation using breadboard, we obtained similar results as predicted by PSPICE. It is also able to give the maximum voltage of 1.50 V and current of 15uA for input voltage of 0.3V. The tested and verified conventional circuits in PSPICE software give the boost-up DC voltage up to 9.5V for input voltage of 4.5V. The overall efficiency of the developed circuit is 85%, followed by the software simulation, which is greater than conventional circuit efficiency of 20% in performance evaluator. It is concluded that our developed circuit output voltage can be used to operate for the applications in micro-devices.

Keywords:   Energy harvester, Low voltage, AC-DC rectifier, DC-DC converter, Micro- devices
Pages:         124-129

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