Design and Implementation of a Maximum Power Point Tracking System for a Piezoelectric Wind Energy Harvester Generating High Harmonicity

Abstract

In this work, a maximum power point tracking (MPPT) system for its application to a new piezoelectric wind energy harvester (PWEH) has been designed and implemented. The motivation for such MPPT unit comes from the power scales of the piezoelectric layers being in the order of μW. In addition, the output generates highly disturbed voltage waveforms with high total harmonic distortion (THD), thereby high THD values cause a certain power loss at the output of the PWEH system and an intense motivation is given to design and implement the system. The proposed MPPT system is widely used for many different harvesting studies, however, in this paper it has been used at the first time for such a distorted waveform to our best knowledge. The MPPT consists of a rectifier unit storing the rectified energy into a capacitor with a certain voltage called VOC (i.e., the open circuit voltage of the harvester), then a dc-dc converter is used with the help of the MPPT unit using the half of VOC as the critical value for the performance of the control. It has been demonstrated that the power loss is nearly half of the power for the MPPT-free system, the efficiency has been increased with a rate of 98% and power consumption is measured as low as 5.29 μW.