Low-voltage active diode rectifier for pyroelectric harvesting cell

This paper studies pyroelectric conversion using PLZT cell and diode rectifier. The objective of this work is to observe the possibility of a power supply via an active element. For this purpose, an active diode based rectifier for pyroelectric harvesting systems is presented, simulated and tested on an experimental device. Moreover a comparison between this structure and 2 other is done. The novelty of the proposed rectifier lies in the positioning of the elements, specially the comparators, and the use of resistors to take into account the time response of the comparators. As a result, a constant output voltage of 2.47 V was obtained using the active diode rectifier for temperature oscillation of 32 °C at a frequency of 100 mHz and for a 32.6 MΩ load connected. This represents a gain of 32 % compared with a structure based on p-MOS and a 179 % profit in comparison with a conventional Schottky diode structure. Furthermore, results showed that the maximum power is extracted with the proposed structure and it reaches 0.113 μW for a frequency of 50 mHz and 0.244 μW for a 100 mHz temperature variation. This represents a gain of at least 93 % compared to the two other structures.