Stanimir Valtchev

Piezoelectric energy harvesting has received great attention over the last 20 years. The main goal of this work is to discuss the potential advantages of introducing non-linearities in the dynamics of a beam type piezoelectric vibration energy harvester. The described device is essentially a cantilever beam partially covered by piezoelectric material with a force electromagnetically applied to the beam. Through experimental tests it has been confirmed the benefits of introducing non-linearities in these types of systems.

This paper presents a wireless energy transfer (WET) system operating at the frequency of tens of kHz. It treats the modeling and simulation of WET prototype and its comparison with experimental measuring results. The wireless energy transfer system model was created to simulate the electric field between the emitting and the receiving coils, applying the finite element method. The results from the simulation are compared to the measured values of the electric field emission from the wireless energy transfer equipment. In the recent years the interest in the WET technology, especially for the electric vehicles (EV) batteries charging, is rapidly growing. The WET systems pollute the environment by electromagnetic emissions. Due to the expanding use of this technology in industrial and consumer electronics products, the problems associated with the electromagnetic compatibility (EMC), and the adverse impact on the human health becomes highly important.

With the objective of having a solar thermoelectric system, running for 24 h a day along the different seasons of the year it is necessary to dimension the adequate storage and back-up systems. The choice of the back-up source of energy depends on how sustainable the power plant should be. In this study, the choice was the use of biomass in order to have a 100{%} renewable power plant. The selected site was the Alentejo region (Portugal). The local Direct Normal Irradiation (DNI) data was used to simulate with the System Advisor Model program (SAM) considering a solar system with north field and molten salt storage. The system needs no back-up during three months in a year. The use of biomass pellets is a viable alternative because it makes the power plant 100{%} renewable and dispatchable without loss of energy due to over-dimension of the expensive solar field and molten storage system.

This paper proposes a Tunnel FET (TFET)-based power management circuit (PMC) for ultra-low power RF energy harvesting applications. In contrast with conventional thermionic devices, the band-to-band tunneling mechanism of TFETs allows a better switching performance at sub-0.2 V operation. As a result, improved efficiencies in RF-powered circuits are achieved, thanks to increased rectification performance at low power levels and to the reduced energy required for a proper PMC operation. It is shown by simulations that heterojunction TFET devices designed with III-V materials can improve the rectification process at received power levels below-20 dBm (915 MHz) when compared to the application of homojunction III-V TFETs and Si FinFETs. For an available power of-25 dBm, the proposed converter is able to deliver 1.1 $μ }\text{W}$ of average power (with 0.5 V) to the output load with a boost efficiency of 86{%}.

This paper presents the experimental results obtained in the wireless energy transfer (WET) system prototype based on coils: circular or planar. With these experimental results we can choose the tuning settings to improve the efficiency of power transmission of the WET systems. In WET for electric vehicle batteries charging, the coil shape and the range between the coils are the most important issues of those systems.