Electrical Energy Injection using Hybrid SECE for High Performance Nonlinear Mechanical Energy Harvesting

This work investigates the idea of using electrical energy injection for nonlinear mechanical energy harvesters (MEH). The system level analysis and device simulations suggest an improved performance can be obtained by selectively injecting an external signal. It further explores the possibility of using a hybrid MEH device combining piezoelectric and electromagnetic transducers to implement the proposed electrical energy injection method. The hybrid SECE technique is used to design the power management interface circuitry which also performs the energy injection. The designed circuits are simulated using CMOS 180 nm process and in region of multi-stability, it shows peak improvement in device output voltage around 6x time and in extracted power around 40-80x compared to conventional hybrid SECE energy harvesting technique.