Circuitry for nonlinear vibration energy harvesting

Nonlinear vibration energy harvesting is becoming a technology more and more important. Generally vibrations are spread over hundreds or thousands of hertz, making impractical the use of tuned systems. Real world vibrations are even not constant in amplitude, and this makes hard to design a high efficiency electrical energy rectifier and regulator due to the non constant RMS value of the input energy. In this paper is described the solution adopted for a wireless sensor for the automotive market, powered by a nonlinear bi-stable vibration energy harvester.