In this paper, we propose a new design procedure to determine the optimal size of a piezoelectric transformer (PT) for DC/DC converter applications. We examined several parameters, which allows us to produce a piezoelectric transformer with optimal efficiency and which has an optimal range for regulating voltage. The characteristics of a piezoelectric transformer (PT) are well known when the load impedance is a pure resistor. However, when piezoelectric transformers are used in AC/DC or DC/DC converter applications, it requires the presence of a rectifier circuit block. A rectifier is usually a nonlinear device which does not act like a pure resistor. We began by modeling a full-wave rectifier directly in order to understand the design constraint variables such as the maximum mechanical current, the piezoelectric transformer configuration, and the energy balance of the PT configuration. In our final design, a stacked disk-type piezoelectric transformer with radial-mode vibration was chosen due to the large number of design parameters required. In our new design procedure, instead of just looking at the typical optimal loading condition of the PT, we used the concept of a maximum mechanical current to determine the new optimal efficiency which is suitable for voltage regulation. From our results we found that the size of the piezoelectric transformer and efficiency are trade-offs which means that they have an inverse relationship. In summary, we developed a new design procedure to determine the optimal size of a piezoelectric transformer, which we found to be small but with high efficiency so as to provide an optimal range for regulating voltage.

In this study, a superoxide dismutase gene (PsSOD) from Pseudoalteromonas sp. ANT506 was cloned and over expressed in Escherichia coli. The PsSOD has an open reading frame of 582 bp with a putative product of 193 amino acid residue and an estimated molecular size of 21.4 kDa. His-tagged PsSOD was subsequently purified 12.6-fold by Ni-affinity chromatography and the yield of 22.9%. The characterization of the purified rPsSOD exhibited maximum activity at 30 °C and pH 8.0. The enzyme exhibited 13.9% activity at 0 °C and had high-thermo lability at higher than 50 °C. rPsSOD exhibited well capability to 2.5 M NaCl (62.4%). These results indicated that rPsSOD exhibited special catalytic properties.

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In this article, a piezoelectric energy harvesting device comprises a bistable vibrating cantilever beam and a switching-type interface circuit (synchronized switching harvesting on an inductor) is proposed, and the resulting performance is compared to the traditional linear technique. It was known that the synchronized switching techniques increase efficiently the output power of the piezoelectric energy harvester for low-coupled structures. However, the traditional piezoelectric energy harvester based on a cantilever beam is only efficient at resonance. To broaden the available bandwidth, a bistable nonlinear technique was proposed. In this article, the bistable technique and synchronized switching harvesting on an inductor interface are combined together to accomplish a more efficient broadband piezoelectric energy harvester. The power flow and work cycles are adopted to simplify the analysis of the switching techniques and then summarize the increasing performance of the nonlinear piezoelectric harvester. Finally, simulation results and experimental validations show that the proposed integrated device owns larger bandwidth and collects more harvested energy.