Circuital Emulation for testing Electromagnetic Vibration Energy Harvesters

In this paper a circuital emulation technique for resonant electromagnetic vibration energy harvesters is proposed and discussed. The idea of circuital emulation is here proposed for the first time in the field of electromagnetic vibration harvesters. In particular, a circuital emulation technique based on a cheap hardware system with easily adjustable parameters is much more easy, fast and practical, at least for a preliminary though very important and necessary analysis. This is particularly relevant when the analysis is focused on the AC/DC electronic interfaces between harvesters and DC loads. Starting from the characteristics that are typically provided by manufacturers of harvesters, the parameters of the harvester circuital model are derived and used for the implementation of a simple and fully electronic circuital emulator based on an op-amp inductor realization. Experimental results are presented and discussed.