ENERGY HARVESTING TO POWER AN AUTONOMOUS SENSOR FROM MECHANICAL VIBRATIONS

Abstract

This paper describes an approach for harvesting electrical energy from a low-cost piezoelectric element operating at low amplitude vibration to power an autonomous and self-powered sensor. The converter consists of an ordinary piezoelectric buzzer and a steel ball bonded onto it. Furthermore, the design of the CMOS energy processor is presented focusing on the voltage multiplier and for which simulation and measurements results are discussed. This paper presents simple and analytical formulas with high precision to predict the dc output voltage of the voltage multiplie