An Energy Storage Unit Design for a Piezoelectric Wind Energy Harvester Having High Total Harmonic Distortion

A new energy storage unit, which was fed by a piezoelectric wind energy harvester is explored. The outputs of a three-phase piezoelectric wind energy device have been initially recorded from the laboratory experiments. Following the records of voltage outputs, the power ranges of the device are measured as several hundreds of microWatts. The main issue of the piezoelectric voltage generation is that voltage waveforms of the piezoelectric materials have high total harmonic distortion (THD) with incredibly high subharmonics and superharmonics. Therefore, such a material reply causes a certain power loss at the output of the wind energy generator. In order to fix this problem, we propose a combination of a rectifier and a storage system, where they can operate compatibly under such high THD rates (i.e. 125). Due to high THD values, current - voltage characteristics are not linear-dependent, indeed because of capacitive effect of the piezoelectric (i.e. Lead Zirconium Titanite) material, harvested power from the material is reduced by nearly the factor of 20% in the output. That also negatively affects the storage on the Li-based battery. In order to compensate the output waveform of the device, the waveforms, which are received from the energy harvester device are first rectified by a full-wave-rectifier having a maximum power point tracking (MPPT) unit. To conclude, a better harvesting performance has been obtained by storing the energy into the Li-ion battery under a current-voltage controlled boost converter technique.