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.

Keywords

• circularly polarized antenna
• Schiffman phase shifter
• sequential rotation feeding network
• ambient RF energy harvesting
• self-powered wireless sensor