Abstract
Self-powered electronic devices have found application in several fields, for instance, the Internet of Things (IoT), smart buildings, remote sensing, and wireless sensor network. Energy harvesting devices are gaining more interest in these devices due to the maintenance problem and short lifespan of batteries. Moreover, a lower gain of the antenna, coupled with the compact size and low conversion efficiency of the rectifier imposes further limitations to the application of antenna-based energy harvesting systems. This paper presents a high gain antenna of 6.69 dBi within an electrical dimension of 0.3248 lambda x0.3248 lambda; this antenna exhibited a resonance of 2.4 GHz and can be adopted for microwave energy harvesting from the available Wi-Fi band. A commercially available RF-DC converter module, RFD-ASSY-01, was coupled to the proposed antenna for the conversion of the received RF signal to DC. The available output DC voltage of this converter was measured, and the power conversion efficiency was calculated for a 7 dBm transmitted power of NETTS (AC1200) WLAN router placing it 1 meter away from the receiving antenna. The experimental result showed that the transmitted power by the proposed rectenna achieved 71% power conversion efficiency. The comparison of this system with some existing works showed that the proposed energy harvesting system performed better even with a small-sized antenna. Thus, the system can energize low-power electronic devices using power sourced from nearby electromagnetic sources.