An Improved Self-Powered H-Bridge Circuit for Voltage Rectification of Piezoelectric Energy Harvesting System

Abstract

In recent years, piezoelectric materials have been widely investigated for harvesting energy from ambient vibrations. A vibrating piezoelectric device (PD) generates alternating current (AC), which needs to be converted into direct current (DC) for powering electronic devices or for storage. A traditional full-wave bridge rectifier (FBR) interface circuit serves this purpose, but it suffers from high power loss due to the presence of high forward voltage across the diodes. In this article, an improved H-Bridge rectifier circuit is proposed as the AC-DC rectifier circuit to reduce power loss for high frequency and low amplitude application. The performance of the proposed rectifier circuit was experimentally studied, analysed and discussed. Two different testing scenarios for high frequency, namely, varying input power with fixed excitation frequency and varying excitation frequency with fixed input voltage were considered. Applicability of the circuit at low frequency range was also investigated. The outcome shows that the proposed circuit notably increases the voltage and the power produced from the PD when compared to traditional FBR circuits.

Keywords

• Piezoelectric energy harvesting
• rectifier circuits
• self-powered AC-DC circuit
• H-bridge
• MOSFET