Wind energy harvesting is a widespread mature technology employed to collect energy, but it is also suitable, and not yet fully exploited at small scale, for powering low power electronic systems such as Internet of Things (IoT) systems like structural health monitoring, on-line sensors, predictive maintenance, manufacturing processes and surveillance. The present work introduces a three-phase mini wind energy harvester and an Alternate Current/Direct Current (AC/DC) converter. The research analyzes in depth a wind harvester’s operation principles in order to extract its characteristic parameters. It also proposes an equivalent electromechanical model of the harvester, and its accuracy has been verified with prototype performance results. Moreover, unlike most of the converters which use two steps for AC/DC signal conditioning—a rectifier stage and a DC/DC regulator—this work proposes a single stage converter to increase the system efficiency and, consequently, improve the energy transfer. Moreover, the most suitable AC/DC converter architecture was chosen and optimized for the best performance taking into account: the target power, efficiency, voltage levels, operation frequency, duty cycle and load required to implement the aforementioned converter.

In this study, we report a power management circuit for a combined piezoelectric- electrodynamic generator. A piezoelectric element is bonded to a spring steel cantilever beam and a magnet, used as tip mass, oscillates through a coil. This principle creates the combined generator. A test setup has been created to automate the characterization of the piezoelectric generator and its power management circuit. Three different power management circuits for the piezoelectric part of the combined generator have been analysed: a bridge rectifier, an SSHI circuit with an external inductance and an SSHI circuit which utilizes the coil of the electrodynamic generator as circuit element. The three circuits are compared in terms of their output power, efficiency and power density. The SSHI circuit with an external inductance has the highest output power and efficiency, followed by the SSHI circuit with the electrodynamic generator coil. The power density of the bridge rectifier is the highest but for higher efficiency the power density of the SSHI circuit with the coil of the electromagnetic generator reaches the best results.

Vibrational energy harvesters are used for collecting electrical power from mechanical vibrations and supplying low power applications. Combining a piezoelectric generator with an electrodynamic generator creates a hybrid piezoelectrodynamic generator. In this paper, a model for this hybrid generator is proposed. The model allows the accurate simulation of the mechanical and electrical part of the generator. It also makes it possible to analyze the waveforms and phase relationships of the two electrical outputs of the hybrid generator and thus simulate power management circuits and their feedback on the generator.

AC-DC converters employed for harvesting power from piezoelectric transducers can be divided into linear (i.e. diode bridge) and non-linear (i.e. synchronized switch harvesting on inductor, SSHI). This paper presents an analytical technique based on the measurement of the impedance circle of the piezoelectric element to determine whether either diode bridge or SSHI converter harvests more of the available power at the piezoelectric element.