Multiband Ambient RF Energy Harvester with High Gain Wideband Circularly Polarized Antenna toward Self-Powered Wireless Sensors

Abstract

In this work toward a sustainable operation of a self-powered wireless sensor, we investigated a multiband Wi-Fi/3G/4G/5G energy harvester based on a novel wideband circularly polarized antenna, a quadplexer, and rectifiers at four corresponding bands. This proposed antenna consisted of four sequentially rotated dual-dipoles, fed by a hybrid feeding network with equal amplitude and an incremental 90° phase delay. The feeding network was composed of three Wilkinson power dividers and Schiffman phase shifters. Based on the sequential rotation method, the antenna obtained a −10 dB reflection coefficient bandwidth of 71.2% from 1.4 GHz to 2.95 GHz and a 3 dB axial ratio (AR) bandwidth of 63.6%, from 1.5 GHz to 2.9 GHz. In addition, this antenna gain was higher than 6 dBi in a wide bandwidth from 1.65 GHz to 2.8 GHz, whereas the peak gain was 9.9 dBi. The quad-band rectifier yielded the maximum AC–DC conversion efficiency of 1.8 GHz and was 60% at −1 dBm input power, 2.1 GHz was 55% at 0 dBm, 2.45 GHz was 55% at −1 dBm, and 2.6 GHz was 54% at 0.5 dBm, respectively. The maximum RF–DC conversion efficiency using the wideband circularly polarized antenna was 27%, 26%, 25.5%, and 27.5% at −6 dBm of input power, respectively.

A New RF Energy Harvesting System Based on Two Architectures to Enhance the DC Output Voltage for WSN Feeding

“…Many works on RF energy harvesting system architectures have been reported in the literature [10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24]. In these systems, different antenna and rectifier structures have been proposed to obtain sufficient RF output power with improved gain and efficiency.…”

“…In these systems, the antenna is a multi-band one followed either by a multi-band rectifier or several single-band rectifiers that are matched to the antenna for different frequencies [16][17][18][19]. In [16], the authors present a 3D RF energy harvesting system with a multi-band antenna covering the frequencies 1.8 GHz, 2.1 GHz, 2.45 GHz, and 2.6 GHz. It demonstrates a maximum gain of 10 dBi at 2.45 GHz.…”

“…Figure 18 presents the second architecture. It consists of summing the DC output voltages delivered by each rectenna (antenna + rectifier) [14][15][16]25]. This architecture presents an ideal summation when the system is an open load.…”

Self-Powered Wireless Sensor Matrix for Air Pollution Detection with a Neural Predictor

“…It is best to look for a combination of all three; however, only EH can extend the maintenance-free time of the platform in a non-linear way and even beyond the expected lifetime. Many research centers are working on self-powered sensing circuits for integrating wireless sensing, energy harvesting, power management and energy storage, and data processing [10,11].Research also includes the development of antennas [12], energy harvesting from unusual sources such as hydraulic vibrations [13] or even nanotribological sources [14]. Interestingly, according to [15], the use of multi-scale sensors and biosensors in the multisensor platform could significantly improve the quality of detection in medicine as well, more effectively identifying possible SARS-CoV-19 virus infections.…”

A Wideband Circularly Polarized Magnetoelectric Dipole Antenna for 5G Millimeter-Wave Communications

“…In addition, circularly polarized (CP) antennas have been a unique choice for stable communication due to their resilience to multipath interference and polarization mismatching between receiving and transmitting antennas. These features make CP antennas the desirable candidate for numerous applications including satellite communication, radar communication, randomly oriented RFID (radio frequency identification) tags, GPS (global positioning system), and sensors [ 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 ]. Therefore, the design of CP antennas has always been a hot topic for antenna designers, compared with linear polarized (LP) antennas.…”