Low-Power Design of a Self-powered Piezoelectric Energy Harvesting System

A low-power energy harvesting system targeting to harvest several microwatts from vibration is presented in this paper. The system consists of a piezoelectric vibration energy harvester and a power condition circuit. The proposed circuit store energy by an integrated bimorph piezoelectric generator that extracts energy from ambient vibrations. The generator is fabricated using thick film printing technology. The experiment measured that the generator produced a maximum RMS output power of 100 uW when excited at vibration with a frequency of 30 Hz and peak amplitude of 0.5 g (4.9 m.s(-2)). Our research show that the proposed system can store the generated power effectively and deliver a smooth and reliable DC to power up a wireless sensor node (WSN).