Revisit of series-SSHI with comparisons to other interfacing circuits in piezoelectric energy harvesting

SSHI (synchronized switch harvesting on inductor) techniques have been demonstrated to be capable of boosting power in vibration-based piezoelectric energy harvesters. However, the effect of frequency deviation from resonance on the electrical response of an SSHI system has not been taken into account from the original analysis. Here an improved analysis accounting for such an effect is proposed to investigate the electrical behavior of a series-SSHI system. The analytic expression of harvested power is proposed and validated numerically. Its performance evaluation is carried out and compared with the piezoelectric systems using either the standard or parallel-SSHI electronic interfaces. The result shows that the electrical response of an ideal series-SSHI system is in sharp contrast to that of an ideal parallel-SSHI system. The former is similar to a strongly coupled electromechanical standard system operated at the open circuit resonance, while the latter is analogous to that operated at the short circuit resonance with different magnitudes of matching impedance. In addition, the performance degradation due to non-ideal voltage inversion is also discussed. It shows that a series-SSHI system avails against the standard technique in the case of medium coupling, since its peak power is close to the ideal optimal power and the reduction in power is less sensitive to frequency deviation. However, the consideration of inevitable diode loss in practical devices favors the parallel-SSHI technique, since the frequency-insensitive feature is much more pronounced in parallel-SSHI systems than in series-SSHI systems.