Design and Analysis of an Adaptive Boost Converter for Piezoelectric Energy Harvester

Using piezoelectric elements to harvest energy from ambient vibrations has been of great interest over the past few years. This paper presents a two-stage adaptive boost converter with low-voltage starter for low voltage piezoelectric energy harvester. The adaptive technique can deal with a range of input voltages from the excited piezoelectric generator for required output voltages. The parameters of the converter including inductance, switching frequency, duty cycles and the input/output voltage are studied for better conversion efficiencies. The simulation results show that a two-stage adaptive boost converter can achieve a high efficiency of 92.3% for low voltage piezoelectric harvester to charge an energy storage device with higher voltage.