State-of-the-Art Power Management Circuits for Piezoelectric Energy Harvesters

Abstract

Piezoelectric energy harvesters scavenging energy from the environment have been a promising solution to satisfy the increasing power demand in wireless sensor nodes. Power conditioning circuits for piezoelectric energy harvesters are a burgeoning technology widely disclosed in literature since 2001; however, there is still no complete overview available, which exhaustively describes the cutting-edge status of the research on power conditioning for piezoelectric energy harvesters. This paper aims at providing a more complete review on the state-of-the-art piezoelectric energy harvesting interfaces. A systematic categorization of the piezoelectric energy harvesting approaches is presented, based on the qualitative working principle, adopted control scheme, and employed components. The presented power conditioning interfaces are commented and discussed in detail, addressing the strengths and weaknesses based on the achieved results. Furthermore, this paper performs a critical comparison of state-of-the-art techniques by employing seven criteria to evaluate the performance of an energy harvesting system. The observed trend in this field is to design harvesting rectification schemes by employing Maximum Power Point Tracking (MPPT) algorithms to achieve a high Power Conversion Efficiency (PCE) and, resonant rectification techniques to harvest efficiently energy from wide-band excitations.