Electrical – Diode Bridge Rectifier using Dual Schottkey Diode Bridge

bridge-rectifierdiodesschottky

I am trying to develop the first stage circuitry of a kinetic energy harvester from that is made using magnets and a coil. I attach a photo of the harvester taken during development.

Photo of the Electromagnetic Harvester

My intention is to efficiently convert the voltage coming out of the coil to a DC voltage so that I can power up a TI energy harvester IC ( hopefully BQ25505 or similar) at a later state to charge a Lithium Battery.

The very first step assigned to me is to develop a good rectifier bridge. I would like to ask from the community if I can use the following IC that has a set of schottkeys integrated by TI for my purpose.

IC : http://www.ti.com/lit/ds/symlink/uc2610.pdf
Internal Schematic of IC
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I have gone through the IC and it claims to give a ~0.3V drop for 1mA current.

enter image description hereI have measured my harvester to not exceed 10mA of generation. It is also one of my requirements to simulate my results soon and thats why I have chosen such an IC.

My first question is Can I use this IC for my low voltage dropout rectification perpose?

My second question is that i can notice that there are two rectifier bridges. Therefore, can i provide the same AC output of the harvester coil to both bridges to with the hope of obtaining a lower voltage drop?

Finally, what are the disadvantages of following this type of an approach? Is there a better way I can rectify the generated AC energy waveform?

Best Answer

schematic

simulate this circuit – Schematic created using CircuitLab

Figure 1. Centre-tapped energy harvester.

If you double the coil windings you can halve the diode losses as shown in Figure 1. Only one diode will be conducting at any time compared with two on a full-wave bridge.

Since each winding conducts only half the time the wire gauge can be reduced for the same total output power.

It won't hurt to parallel the diodes and may result in ever-so-slightly lower voltage drop.