Single crystals and nonlinear process for outstanding vibration-powered electrical generators

This paper compares the performances of vibration-powered electrical generators using a piezoelectric ceramic and a piezoelectric single crystal associated to several power conditioning circuits. A new approach of the piezoelectric power conversion based on a nonlinear voltage processing is presented, leading to three novel high performance power conditioning interfaces. Theoretical predictions and experimental results show that the nonlinear processing technique may increase the power harvested by a factor of 8 compared to standard techniques. Moreover, it is shown that, for a given energy harvesting technique, generators using single crystals deliver 20 times more power than generators using piezoelectric ceramics.