A Conditioning System for High-Voltage Electrostatic/Triboelectric Energy Harvesters Using Bennet Doubler and Self-Actuated Hysteresis Switch

Abstract

Electrostatic kinetic energy harvester and more particularly triboelectric nanogenerators (TENG) can generate very high output AC voltages of several hundred volts. In addition, the losses due to the energy transfer between the typically small inner capacitance of the generators and a necessary large reservoir capacitance for collecting the harvested energy, severely limits the energy storage efficiency. In this paper, we propose a 2-stage conditioning system that efficiently manages the high-voltages of a TENG without any external active control. It includes, as the 1st stage, an unstable charge pump (a Bennet doubler) for the signal rectification and, as the 2nd stage, a novel self-actuated electrostatic switch having a narrow hysteresis followed by a DC-DC Buck converter. With this system, the converted energy is improved by 24 times compared to a classical full-wave diode bridge, while the output voltage remains below 20 V and then is compatible with commercial regulators.