A Self-Powered Electronic Interface for Electromagnetic Energy Harvester

This paper presents a self-powered, active electronic interface for an energy harvesting system including a vibration-based electromagnetic transducer. The transducer provides a peak voltage of 3.25 V when operated close to its mechanical resonance frequency (about 10.4 Hz) and the power converter has been designed to transfer the harvested energy to a storage capacitor. The circuit is a full-cycle inductive step-up ac/dc converter able to process every voltage pulse coming from the transducer; furthermore, it is supplied by the harvested energy, making the system fully autonomous. The interface has been designed exploiting an accurate model of the transducer in simulations. A printed circuit board version of the interface has been simulated and built to gather experimental results and validate the idea. The system demonstrated to be able to build a voltage across the storage capacitor, which is limited only by the safe operating area of the devices.