Performance of a circular piezoelectric plate harvester with a rectified interface

We analyze the performance of a circular piezoelectric plate harvester with a rectified interface in this paper. Usually, there exist three parts in the harvester system: an energy-harvesting structure, a real electrochemical battery, and a rectified dc-dc converter to connect the harvesting structure and the storage battery as a whole. The energy-harvesting structure is composed of a circular piezoelectric plate and a paralleled synchronized switch harvesting inductor (SSHI). A large capacitor is applied to store the energy scavenged by the piezoelectric structure. A full-bridge rectifier is employed to convert ac out from the piezoelectric structure to dc for storage. Using the linear piezoelectric theory and the multi-time scale analysis method, the energy-scavenging process is analyzed in detail. Numerical results show that there is an optimal rectified voltage to enable the harvester operating in the optimal efficiency.