RF energy harvesters for wireless sensors, state of the art, future prospects and challenges: a review

The power consumption of portable gadgets, implantable medical devices (IMDs) and wireless sensor nodes (WSNs) has reduced significantly with the ongoing progression in low-power electronics and the swift advancement in nano and microfabrication. Energy harvesting techniques that extract and convert ambient energy into electrical power have been favored to operate such low-power devices as an alternative to batteries. Due to the expanded availability of radio frequency (RF) energy residue in the surroundings, radio frequency energy harvesters (RFEHs) for low-power devices have garnered notable attention in recent times. This work establishes a review study of RFEHs developed for the utilization of low-power devices. From the modest single band to the complex multiband circuitry, the work reviews state of the art of required circuitry for RFEH that contains a receiving antenna, impedance matching circuit, and an AC-DC rectifier. Furthermore, the advantages and disadvantages associated with various circuit architectures are comprehensively discussed. Moreover, the reported receiving antenna, impedance matching circuit, and an AC-DC rectifier are also compared to draw conclusions towards their implementations in RFEHs for sensors and biomedical devices applications

Rectifier design for radio frequency energy harvesting system

This thesis presents the development of rectifying circuits suitable for Radio Frequency (RF) energy harvesting application with dual-band capabilities. The main contribution of this thesis is the development of compact dual-band two-stage rectifier with high efficiency. Firstly, a voltage doubler rectifying circuit is designed to get a compact size. A source-pull simulation of matching circuit is used to find the optimal load impedance and enhance the conversion efficiency over the frequency range. The accuracy of the design has been justified by the simulation and measurement results. Secondly, a dual-band impedance matching network based on transmission line is developed. A short stub and general impedance transformer are designed to match different complex impedance at the two operating frequencies. Measurement results have fully demonstrated. Thirdly, a new rectifier circuit is proposed. It employs a dual-band multi resonant matching network and a high efficiency modified quadruplor rectifier for harvesting the ambient RF power at both 2.45 GHz Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) and 5.8 GHz Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN). An attempt was made for matching network with a series of combination of a capacitor and inductor with a parallel LC tank. For rectifier circuit part, low power harvested from the RF is boosted up using two-stage of voltage multiplier and the input capacitor is rearranged to be in parallel connection to get smaller size and uniform pressure on diode. The prototypes are developed, and simulation results are obtained. The proposed rectifier is proven to exhibit greatly higher output voltage and efficiency compared to the conventional circuit. The rectifier is designed on the FR-4 board. Its capability of working within two frequency bands at 2.45 GHz and 5.8 GHz is verified by measurement. The proposed rectifier has met the requirement of high conversion efficiency (79.1% and 78.4% at the respective 2.45 GHz and 5.8 GHz), and able to boost up to the maximum voltage level of 14V at 20 dBm input power. Hence, the aims of this research have been achieved and are practically suitable for the use in wireless sensor networks and low power devices