Paper
8 March 2014 A tapped-inductor buck-boost converter for a multi-DEAP generator energy harvesting system
Emmanouil Dimopoulos, Stig Munk-Nielsen
Author Affiliations +
Abstract
Interest on Dielectric ElectroActive Polymer (DEAP) generators has aroused among scientists in recent years, due to the former ones’ documented advantages against competing electromagnetic and field-activated technologies. Yet, the need for bidirectional energy flow under high step-up and high step-down voltage conversion ratios, accompanied by low-average but relatively high-peak currents, imposes great challenges on the design of the employed power electronic converter. On top of that, the shortage of commercially-available, high-efficient, high-voltage, low-power semiconductor devices limits the effective operational range of the power electronic converter. In this paper, a bidirectional tapped-inductor buck-boost converter is proposed, addressing high- efficient high step-up and high step-down voltage conversion ratios, for energy harvesting applications based on DEAP generators. The effective operational range of the converter is extended, by replacing its high-side switch with a string of three serialized MOSFETs, to accommodate the need for high-efficient high-voltage operation. Experiments conducted on a single DEAP generator - part of a quadruple DEAP generator energy harvesting system with all elements installed sequentially in the same circular disk with a 90° phase shift - validate the applicability of the proposed converter, demonstrating energy harvesting of 0.26 J, at 0.5 Hz and 60% delta- strain; characterized by an energy density of 1.25 J per kg of active material.
© (2014) COPYRIGHT Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE). Downloading of the abstract is permitted for personal use only.
Emmanouil Dimopoulos and Stig Munk-Nielsen "A tapped-inductor buck-boost converter for a multi-DEAP generator energy harvesting system", Proc. SPIE 9056, Electroactive Polymer Actuators and Devices (EAPAD) 2014, 90560J (8 March 2014); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2045036
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Cited by 2 scholarly publications.
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KEYWORDS
Energy harvesting

Switches

Capacitance

Electrodes

Data modeling

Field effect transistors

Inductance

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