Contribution to the design of electromagnetic power harvesting system

Abstract

In this report, a compact Rectenna is designed and fabricated with the aim of harvesting RF energy at the frequency of 2.4 GHz. The system consists of a 40mm x 40mm microstrip patch antenna, a Villard voltage doubler for the rectifier circuit designed with HSMS-2850 Schottkey diode for RF application. The rectifier and antenna are joined with a ?-matching network composed of printed lumped components for impedance matching, consisting of a series interdigital capacitor and shunt strip inductors. It should be mentioned that the use of printed lumped components is not found in any literature related to energy harvesting as of the writing of this report. The system has been designed on an FR-4 substrate with thickness of 1.5 mm, a tangent loss of 0.02 and relative permittivity of 4.4. Using an RF generator connected to the energy harvesting circuit, the circuit generates measurable voltage starting from 7dBm input power. The realized circuit gives a DC output voltage of 5.4mV at 20dBm input power with a PCE of 2.916 × 10 -6 %.