Performance Analysis of an Efficient Active Rectifier for Powering LEDs using Piezoelectric Energy Harvesting Systems

Energy harvesting from the renewable energy sources plays an important role in day to day life. Various methods have been used to capture the energy for different sources. One of the most popular and prominent method of energy harvesting from vibrations is by using piezoelectric material. Piezoelectric vibration harvesting is attractive mainly due to the simplicity of piezoelectric transduction and the piezoelectric systems can be easily implemented into a wide variety of applications. Due to low power and wide range of ac output voltage, the piezoelectric generator cannot directly support the ac or dc electrical appliances. Hence in most applications the ac signal produced by this generator needs to be rectified. In this project a new highly efficient active full bridge rectifier for piezoelectric energy harvesting is proposed, which increases the extracted power from the piezoelectric crystal. The proposed rectifier reduces the voltage drop along the conduction path and thereby increases the power extraction and conversion capability. The proposed circuit is simulated in PSpice software package and the performance is evaluated.