Techniques used to synchronize multi-phase AC-DC converters for energy harvesting applications, a review

Energy harvesting has become an interest area to research, due to the wide range of applications were could be employed. AC energy harvesting schemes present an important disadvantage with respect to DC harvesting schemes, they need to synchronize the operation of the power converter with the electric generator voltage waveform. In order to get this synchronization there are different schemes reported, each one has its advantages and disadvantages and in function of the application they are representative or not. In this paper a review of the different AC energy harvesting schemes with different techniques used to synchronize the power converter and the electric generator are shown, at the end of the review a simple scheme with reduced number of components and minimum computational cost is proposed.