Electrical efficiency of SECE-based interfaces for piezoelectric vibration energy harvesting

Piezoelectric energy harvesting interfaces have been widely investigated during the last decades in order to maximize the harvested power. Among the energy extraction circuits proposed in the literature, some of the most effective ones consist of extracting the electric charges from the piezoelectric elements in a synchronous way with the vibrations and within a very short portion of the vibration period (synchronized electric charge extraction (SECE), synchronous electric charge partial extraction, frequency tunable synchronous electrical charge extraction (FTSECE), etc.). For these strategies, most previous studies take the electrical efficiency (i.e. the electrical losses between the energy extracted from the piezoelectric element and the energy which is finally transferred in a storage element) into account in an ad-hoc and case-by-case manner. In this brief, we propose a unified analysis that applies to model the electrical efficiency of these SECE-based strategies taking into account losses introduced by the electrical interface. We identify the main loss mechanisms by demonstrating that the electrical efficiency mainly varies with two parameters: the quality factor of the electrical interface and the voltage inversion ratio of the considered strategy. Measurements on the FTSECE strategy show that our model predicts the stored power with a good accuracy and allows a better optimization of the harvesting interface (up to 5.4 times more stored power at off-resonance frequencies, and 30% larger harvesting bandwidth).