Energy Harvesting from Non-Stational Environmental Vibrations using a Voltage-Boost Rectifier Circuit

Abstract

We report an energy harvesting technique that generates electrical power from non -stational environmental vibrations. To utilize weak vibrations that are wasted by conventional rectifiers, we employ a voltage-boost rectifier (VBR) circuit. The VBR can convert small AC voltage from vibrational energy harvesters (VEHs) to a DC output voltage for driving a latter circuity, as reported in PowerMEMS 2018. A VBR chip is implemented by the complementary metal -oxide semiconductor (CMOS) technology and experimentally evaluated with an electret-based MEMS VEH. The measurement results reveal that the proposed technique can generate effective DC voltage from weak non-stational vibrations.