A Thermoelectric Energy Harvesting System Assisted by A Piezoelectric Transducer Achieving 10-mV Cold-Startup and 82.7% Peak Efficiency
Tianqi Lu (TU Delft - Electronic Instrumentation)
Ruizhi Wang (Student TU Delft)
Zhong Tang (TU Delft - Electronic Instrumentation)
Yiwei Zou (Student TU Delft, Rice University)
Xinling Yue (TU Delft - Electronic Instrumentation)
Yansong Liang (University of California, Student TU Delft)
Haoran Gong (Student TU Delft)
Shurui Liu (Student TU Delft)
Zhiyuan Chen (Fudan University)
Xun Liu (Chinese University of Hong Kong)
Sijun Du (TU Delft - Electronic Instrumentation)
undefined More Authors (External organisation)
More Info
expand_more
Other than for strictly personal use, it is not permitted to download, forward or distribute the text or part of it, without the consent of the author(s) and/or copyright holder(s), unless the work is under an open content license such as Creative Commons.
Abstract
This article presents a 10mV-startup-voltage thermoelectric energy harvesting system, assisted by a piezoelectric generator (PEG) as a cold starter. It exploits the fact that when a thermoelectric energy harvesting system is implemented in a place where kinetic energy is also present, the PEG starter can provide a clock signal to start the system. Thanks to the high output impedance of the PEG, the generated clock voltage can easily go over several hundreds of mV, which can be used to drive the boost converter to harvest thermoelectric energy even at an extremely low thermoelectric generator (TEG) voltage. The proposed system was fabricated in a 180-nm BCD process. The measurement results show that the TEG system can start up from the cold state with a TEG voltage as low as 10 mV while maintaining a 63.9% efficiency. The peak power conversion efficiency reaches 83.7% when the TEG voltage is 55 mV.