Optimization and AMS Modeling for Design of an Electrostatic Vibration Energy Harvester's Conditioning Circuit with an Auto-Adaptive Process to the External Vibration Changes

Abstract

Electrostatic transducers for vibration energy scavenging have been an object to numerous studies, but are still facing major issues relating to their conditioning circuit. One of the most popular ones uses a charge pump and a flyback circuit based on a Buck DC-DC converter (Fig. 1). A commutation between the energy accumulation in the charge pump and the recharge of the buffer capacitor Cres is assured by a switch which is the major bottleneck in the energy harvester circuit. The commutation timing of the switch determines the efficiency of the energy harvesting. In previous papers [1] the switch commutates periodically with some fixed duty ratio. However, this solution is not appropriate when the environment parameters, e.g. the vibration frequency, change. We found that the switching should be ordered by the internal state of the circuit, an not by some fixed timing scenario. We presents how to find the optimal operation mode of the harvester. To validate the study, the system was modeled using a mixed VHDL-AMS - ELDO model.