A New Approach to Wide Bandwidth Energy Harvesting for Piezoelectric Cantilever Based Harvesters

Abstract

This thesis proposes a control system to widen the bandwidth of piezoelectric transducers (PZTs) for vibration energy harvesting while extracting maximum power. A straightforward complex conjugate match achieves maximum power transfer only at a single frequency while requiring an impractically large inductance. The proposed system intends to address these problems. It incorporates a bi-directional DC/DC converter with feed-forward control to achieve a complex conjugate match over a wide range of frequencies. Analysis of the proposed system and simulation results are presented to verify validity of the proposed method.