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S Boisseau et al., Synchronous Electric Charge Extraction for Multiple Piezoelectric Energy Harvesters, Proc. NEWCAS, 2015.
Synchronous Electric Charge Extraction for Multiple
Piezoelectric Energy Harvesters
S. Boisseau, P. Gasnier, M. Perez, C. Bouvard, M. Geisler, A.B. Duret, G. Despesse, J. Willemin
CEA, LETI, Minatec Campus
17, rue des Martyrs - F-38054 Grenoble Cedex 9, France
sebastien.boisseau@cea.fr
Abstract—This paper presents a power management circuit
implementing a Synchronous Electric Charge Extraction on
piezoelectric energy harvesters based on a flyback architecture.
The novelty of this circuit lies in its ability to handle multiple
energy harvesters operating at different frequencies and different
output voltages with a single and standard flyback coupled
inductor. The power harvested by the various scavengers is
stored in a single and mutual storage capacitor. By construction,
the power management circuit is capable of dealing with high
input voltages (>100V). Its power consumption is about
1.15μA@3V per energy harvester and its conversion efficiency
reaches 83%; its good operation has been validated by
simulations and experiments on two vibration energy harvesters.
Keywords—Energy Harvesting; Power Management;
Piezoelectric Energy Harvesters; Synchronous Electric Charge
Extraction (SECE)
I. INTRODUCTION
Mechanical Energy Harvesting is a relevant candidate to
supply Wireless Sensor Nodes (WSN) and especially in dark or
dusty environments. Various concepts have been proposed to
turn the power of vibrations, shocks, strains or movements of
rotations into electricity to make sensor nodes fully
autonomous for years. The three main electromechanical
conversion principles have been implemented: electrostatic [1],
piezoelectricity [2] and electromagnetism [3]; this paper is
focused on the piezoelectric conversion. The output power of
piezoelectric energy harvesters is generally in the 10μW-
100μW range and it has already been proven that this is enough
to supply basic WSN. Yet, it is interesting to harvest more
power to supply more complex WSN or to increase their
operating frequency. One solution to increase the harvested
power consists in multiplying the number of energy harvesters.
Although the parallelization of energy harvesters has been
proposed in various papers [4], only few efficient power
management circuits have been proposed until now to handle
multiple piezoelectric energy harvesters [5, 6].
This paper presents a power management circuit, based on
a flyback topology, and implementing Synchronous Electric
Charge Extraction (SECE) for multiple piezoelectric energy
harvesters. SECE has already proven its benefits for single
piezoelectric energy harvesters. Here, SECE is adapted to
multiple energy harvesters with the aim of mutualizing the
inductive circuit. The circuit is based on discrete components
and able to deal with high input voltages by construction
(>100V). Only basic electronic functions are employed to limit
the power consumption of the circuit. Section 2 reminds SECE
and the flyback topology which has been chosen. Section 3
introduces the power management circuit able to manage
multiple piezoelectric energy harvesters. Simulation and
experiments results are finally presented in Section 4.
II. SYNCHRONOUS ELECTRIC CHARGE EXTRACTION AND
FLYBACK TOPOLOGY
A. Synchronous Electric Charge Extraction (SECE)
Synchronous Electric Charge Extraction (SECE) [7] is a
Synchronized Switch Harvesting (SSH) technique consisting in
entirely extracting the energy stored in the piezoelectric energy
harvester as soon as its output voltage (V
p
) has reached its
maximum (corresponding to an extremum of displacement of
the energy harvester). This energy is then transferred to a
storage capacitor through a coil (buck or buck-boost topology)
or a coupled-inductor (flyback topology). The rest of the time,
the energy harvester is let in open circuit. The typical
waveforms of SECE applied to a piezoelectric energy harvester