Design and Experimental Analysis of Charge Recovery for Piezoelectric Fan

The piezoelectric (PE) fan is widely adopted in the field of microelectronics cooling due to its advantages of high reliability and good heat dissipation characteristics. However, PE fans driven by conventional circuits suffer from plenty of energy loss. To save energy, we propose an inductor-based charge recovery method and apply it to the driving circuit for the PE fan. Two inductor-based driving circuits, a single inductor-based driving (SID) circuit and a double inductor-based driving (DID) circuit are compared. The SID circuit has a simple structure and a slightly higher energy-saving rate, while the DID circuit introduces no additional oscillations and is more stable. The experimental results show that when the supply voltage changes, both circuits have a relatively stable energy-saving rate, which is about 30% for the SID circuit and 28% for the DID circuit. Moreover, the proposed circuits enjoy the same driving capacity as the conventional circuit, and the driven fan has the same cooling performance.

An Improved Hybrid Feature Selection Algorithm for Electric Charge Recovery Risk

In order to extract more information that affects customer arrears behavior, the feature extraction method is used to extend the low-dimensional features to the high-dimensional features for the warning problem of user arrears risk model of electric charge recovery (ECR). However, there are many irrelevant or redundant features in data, which affect prediction accuracy. In order to reduce the dimension of the feature and improve the prediction result, an improved hybrid feature selection algorithm is proposed, integrating nonlinear inertia weight binary particle swarm optimization with shrinking encircling and exploration mechanism (NBPSOSEE) with sequential backward selection (SBS), namely, NBPSOSEE-SBS, for selecting the optimal feature subset. NBPSOSEE-SBS can not only effectively reduce the redundant or irrelevant features from the feature subset selected by NBPSOSEE but also improve the accuracy of classification. The experimental results show that the proposed NBPSOSEE-SBS can effectively reduce a large number of redundant features and stably improve the prediction results in the case of low execution time, compared with one state-of-the-art optimization algorithm, and seven well-known wrapper-based feature selection approaches for the risk prediction of ECR for power customers.

Power-Efficient Driver Circuit for Piezo Electric Actuator with Passive Charge Recovery

Piezoelectric actuation is a promising principle for insect-scaled robots. A major concern while utilizing a piezoelectric actuator is energy loss due to its parasitic capacitance. In this paper, we propose a new concept to recover the charge stored in the parasitic capacitance; it requires only three additional lightweight passive components: two diodes and a resistor. The advantages of our concept are its small additional mass and simple operating procedure compared with existing charge recovery circuits. We provided a guideline for selecting a resistor using a simplified theoretical model and found that half of the charge can be recovered by employing a resistor that has a resistance sufficiently larger than the forward resistance of the additional diode. In addition, we experimentally demonstrated the concept. With a capacitive load (as a replacement for the piezoelectric actuator), it was successfully observed that the proposed concept decreased the power consumption to 58% of that in a circuit without charge recovery. Considering micro aerial vehicle (MAV) applications, we measured the lift-to-power efficiency of a flapping wing piezoelectric actuator by applying the proposed concept. The lift force was not affected by charge recovery; however, the power consumption was reduced. As a result, the efficiency was improved to 30.0%. We expect that the proposed circuit will contribute to the advancement of energy-saving microrobotics.

Visible light-driven simultaneous water oxidation and quinone reduction by a nano-structured conjugated polymer without co-catalysts

Nanostructured conjugated polymers of diphenylbutadiyne (nano-PDPB) can perform photocatalytic water oxidation under visible light excitation. Charge recovery delayed in time was exemplified by the reduction of quinone acting as a hydrogen reservoir.