Broadband Rectenna for Radio Frequency Energy Harvesting Application

Abstract

A microstrip feed, double-sided printed monopole antenna is presented for radio frequency (RF) energy harvesting application. The antenna structure consists of a circular patch with a truncated ground plane. The ground plane consists of a rectangular notch right below the feed line, which helps to increase the bandwidth of the antenna. In addition, using a rectangular patch in the ground plane increases the effective area of the radiator due to loading effect, which leads to downshifting the lower cut-off frequency, and subsequently bandwidth enhancement. It is found that the ground patch provides the total antenna size reduction of 35.2% along with bandwidth and gain enhancement of 34.7% and 2.03 dBi at 0.9 GHz, respectively. The measured result shows that the proposed antenna offers an impedance bandwidth of 144.5% (0.89–5.53 GHz) with a peak gain of 4.3 dBi. Later, a rectenna system was designed and tested using the developed antenna for a wide range of frequencies. The rectenna system offers the maximum efficiency of 62.5% at 1.8 GHz at the load impedance of 5 kΩ.

KEYWORDS:

• Rectenna
• Rectifier circuit
• RF energy harvesting
• Schottky diode
• Wideband antenna

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sachin Agrawal

Sachin Agrawal did his ME degree from Birla Institute of Technology Pilani, India in 2009. He is currently pursuing his PhD degree from PDPM-Indian Institute of Information Technology Design and Manufacturing Jabalpur, India. His area of interest is RF energy harvesting, antenna designing, and mobile communication.

E-mail: [email protected]

Manoj Singh Parihar

Manoj Singh Parihar did his BTech and MTech degrees from RGPV Bhopal in 2001 and 2004, respectively. He completed his PhD degree from Indian Institute of Technology Delhi in 2012. He was a senior project scientist in Center for Applied Research in Electronics, IIT Delhi from July 2010 to March 2013. In October 2007, he received “Institute of Electronics & Telecommunication Engineers (IETE) Research fellowship” for continuing his research work in reconfigurable antennas. He was a recipient of the travel grant (2007) awarded jointly by National Institute of International Education (NIIED) and Republic of Korea. Currently, he is working as assistant professor in IIITDM Jabalpur. His areas of interest are: reconfigurable antennas, microwave integrated circuits, microwave and millimeter wave device characterization, and RF MEMS.

E-mail: [email protected]

P. N. Kondekar

P. N. Kondekar did his BE degree from Pune University, MTech degree from IISc Bangalore, and PhD degree from IIT Bombay, India in 1983, 1989, and 2003, respectively. Currently, he is a professor in ECE discipline in IIITDM Jabalpur, India. His research interests include micro-electronics, VLSI-CMOS level design, nano-electronics devices, and semiconductor power devices.

E-mail: [email protected]