Impedance adaptation methods of the piezoelectric energy harvesting

In this study, the important issues of energy recovery were addressed and a comprehensive investigation was performed on harvesting electrical power from an ambient mechanical vibration source. Also discussed are the impedance matching methods used to increase the efficiency of energy transfer from the environment to the application.;Initially, the mechanical impedance matching method was investigated to increase mechanical energy transferred to the transducer from the environment. This was done by reducing the mechanical impedance such as damping factor and energy reflection ratio. The vibration source and the transducer were modeled by a two-degree-of-freedom dynamic system with mass, spring constant, and damper. The transmissibility employed to show how much mechanical energy that was transferred in this system was affected by the damping ratio and the stiffness of elastic materials. The mechanical impedance of the system was described by electrical system using analogy between the two systems in order to simply the total mechanical impedance.;Secondly, the transduction rate of mechanical energy to electrical energy was improved by using a PZT material which has a high figure of merit and a high electromechanical coupling factor for electrical power generation, and a piezoelectric transducer which has a high transduction rate was designed and fabricated. The high g material (g33 = 40 [10-3Vm/N]) was developed to improve the figure of merit of the PZT ceramics. The cymbal composite transducer has been found as a promising structure for piezoelectric energy harvesting under high force at cyclic conditions (10--200 Hz), because it has almost 40 times higher effective strain coefficient than PZT ceramics. The endcap of cymbal also enhances the endurance of the ceramic to sustain ac load along with stress amplification. In addition, a macro fiber composite (MFC) was employed as a strain component because of its flexibility and the high electromechanical coupling factor. This characteristic is useful for a small force vibration source which has a high displacement such as human's activities.;An experimental setup was used to apply the same conditions as a vibrating car engine. The experiment was done with a cymbal transducer which has 29 mm PZT diameter, 1mm PZT thickness, and 0.4mm endcap operating under force of 70 N in the frequency range of 10--200 Hz. It was found that the generated power was increased and the output impedance was decreased with a higher frequency of vibration source at a constant force. The experimental results were found to be in agreement with the analytical results from the model using the equivalent circuit. In addition, the FEM simulation (ATILA) was employed to optimize the dimensions of cymbal transducer such as endcap thickness and PZT thickness.;Finally, the electrical impedance matching method used to increase the electrical to electrical energy transfer for some applications was discussed. To match the output impedance, two methods were employed: one is changing capacitance of transducer by size effect and multilayered ceramics, and another one is developing an energy harvesting circuit which consumes low electrical power and maximizes the output transferred to the intended load. The fabricated multilayered ceramics which has 10, 100 mum thick, layers yielded 10 times higher output current for 40 times reduced output load. Also the electrical output power was double. A DC-DC buck converter which has 78% efficiency was fabricated to transfer the accumulated electrical energy to the low output load without consuming more than 5 mW of power itself. In this DC-DC converter, most of the power was consumed by the gate drive which was required for PWM switching. To reduce the power consumption of the gate drive, the switching frequency was fixed at 1 kHz with optimal duty cycle around 1∼5%. Also the dependence of the inductance (L) in the DC-DC converter was investigated and optimized to increase the output power transferred to the small output load. Using this optimized DC-DC converter, two circuits used to light LEDs and charge battery were demonstrated. It was found that the power transferred to the loads was not the maximum power generated by a cymbal transducer because the loads were not matched to the energy source with the DC-DC converter even though the output power was significantly improved by DC-DC converter. An AC-DC converter with a piezoelectric transformer which has 98% efficiency was also studied to maximize the energy transfer to the load of 10∼100O. The output impedance was controlled by a piezoelectric transformer and the driving frequency of the transformer at resonance was adjusted by the AC-DC converter. A DC-DC converter was also used to stabilize the input power of the piezoelectric transformer. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)...