Prof. Paul Mitcheson
Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Imperial College of London
December 8, 2011 | 12:00 to 01:00 | 521 Cory Hall, Hogan Room
Host: Igor Paprotny
The vast majority of work in the energy harvesting and PowerMEMS communities concentrates on transducer design without considering the necessary power electronic interface between transducer and load. Where the power processor circuit has been considered, it has generally been in the form of basic passive rectifiers or simple diode-capacitor voltage step-up circuits, with a few exceptions for piezo devices. In this talk I will discuss some of the new work we have been doing at Imperial on harvester interface circuits for electromagnetic, electrostatic and piezoelectric harvesters. I will show that whilst the electrostatic harvester is attractive from a MEMS processing perspective, it is a nightmare for the power electronics engineer. I will also present new work on resonant frequency tuning using a switch mode power electronic interface and some new circuits for maximum power extraction from piezoelectric devices.
www3.imperial.ac.uk/people/paul.mitcheson
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