Piezoelectric vibration energy harvesting by optimized synchronous electric charge extraction

This article presents a novel nonlinear energy extraction technique for piezoelectric vibration energy harvesting. The proposed approach is an improvement of the previous technique, synchronous electric charge extraction, which is the first that optimizes the harvested power whatever the connected load. The new approach is then named as optimized synchronous electric charge extraction. Compared with synchronous electric charge extraction, the conversion effectiveness is enhanced while simplifying the electronic circuitry and the switch control strategy. The analytical expression of the harvested powers is derived for a classical electromechanical structure. Finally, theoretical predictions confirmed by experimental results show that optimized synchronous electric charge extraction increases the harvested power for a very large range of load resistance, which is a favorable characteristic for wideband vibration energy harvesting.