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Radio Frequency Energy Harvesting Technology

Conference Paper · November 2016

DOI: 10.1109/ISOCC.2016.7799866

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 Radio Frequency Energy Harvesting Technology
Lanxiang Wang1, Menglong He1, Zhao Wang1, Mark Leach1, Jingchen Wang1, Kalok Man2, Eng Gee Lim1
1
Dept. of Electrical and Electronic Engineering,
2
Dept. of Computer Science and Software Engineering,
Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool Univeristy
Suzhou, P.R.China
Enggee.lim@xjtlu.edu.cn
Abstract— Radio frequency (RF) energy harvesting is a
promising technique to energize low power electronic devices due
to the sustainability it could offer resulting from the surge in
ambient wireless signals it could utilize. In this paper, a concise
literature survey on this technique is presented. Firstly, the
architecture of a RF energy harvesting network is briefly
introduced. Secondly, background relating to the antenna and
rectifier designs is provided. Finally, some state-of-the-art
designs from recent years are presented.
Keywords: RF energy harvesting; Rectenna; Antenna;
Rectifier.
I. INTRODUCTION
With the appearance of an increasing number of wearable
electronic devices, the advent of Internet of Things (IoT), and
the maturity of RF identification (RFID), the demand for
suitable power supplies for such electronic devices has surged.
Harvesting energy from the environment to satisfy this demand
is considered to be an eco-friendly and self-sustainable method.
A variety of energy sources have been utilized, such as solar
energy, thermal energy, piezoelectric energy, and radio
frequency (RF) energy. Among these sources, the RF energy
harvesting technique has recently received increasing interest
due to the plentiful and unutilised ambient wireless signals in
the environment, produced by sources such as TV towers,
cellular base stations, and wireless routers [1]. The amount of
energy available for reception could be used to energize low
power electronic devices; this is of particular convenience
when it is difficult or even dangerous to replace batteries. The
crucial component in the RF energy harvester is the rectenna,
which is composed of an antenna and a rectifying circuit. A
rectenna can collect electromagnetic energy and convert it into
DC power.
This paper briefly reviews the development of the rectenna
based RF energy harvesting techniques and is organized as
follows. Section II demonstrates the architecture of a rectenna
RF energy harvesting network. Section III focuses on several
typical antenna and circuit designs. Finally, a brief conclusion
is drawn in Section IV.
II. RF ENERGY HARVESTING NETWORK
A typical architecture for an RF energy harvesting network
is shown in figure 1, which consists of three main components
including an antenna, a matching network, and a rectifier. The
receiving antenna can harvest ambient RF energy from various
transmitting sources. The RF energy can be roughly described
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by both the determinate Friis equation model and the
Fig. 1: RF Energy Harvesting Network
probabilistic Rayleigh model. According to [2], the latter is
considered to be more realistic and practical. A matching
network is used to ensure maximum power is delivered from
the antenna into the rectifier section and avoiding power
reflection [3]. The function of a RF-DC converter is to convert
the AC type RF energy received by an antenna into a DC
voltage, which can be used to supply electronic devices directly
or to be stored for future use.
III. RECTENNA DESIGN
A. Antenna
The antenna, a vital element of an RF energy harvesting
system, is used to capture radiated RF energy from sources
transmitting in the antennas design bandwidth. The designs of
antennas vary for use in different situations including dipole
antennas, microstrip patch antennas, etc. [4]. The designs are
optimized to minimise size and improve antenna gain.
However, these two main requirements cannot always be
fulfilled simultaneously. Antenna such as the Yagi-Uda or
multiband antenna arrays could provide the relatively high
gains desired for a rectenna design, but are generally large in
size. The overall dimensions need to be miniaturized for
deployment and application in mini-type devices including
wearable devices and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) [4][5].
Furthermore, the bandwidth and cost requirements should also
been considered in design.
The sources of signals used for harvesting cover a variety
of frequency bands and include more recent broadcasts such as:
GSM, UMTS, LTE, ISM and wifi, as well as more traditional
broadcasts like FM/AM radio and television [5]. Focussing on
the arears of the RF spectrum with relatively higher spectral
density, maximises harvesting potential. Early receiving
antenna designs of mainly focused on the reception of a single
frequency band [6], while recently dual band and tri band
antennas are also obtaining popularity in some works [5][7].
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 Research into antenna designs for RF energy harvesting
systems has primarily focussed on microstrip based antennas
due to their lightweight, robustness, flexibility and low cost [4].
Patch antennas are widely applied in the design of wearable
devices. The author in [8] designed a microstrip patch antenna
operating over the frequency range 4-9.5 GHz which exhibited
an average gain above 7.4 dBi and efficiency of more than
85%. The microstrip patch antenna in [9] with wearable
substrate was designed to operate in the ISM band (2.4 GHz).
Moreover, the fractal Koch antenna is considered to be an
efficient methodology with smaller size when compared to the
more common Euclidean geometry based antennas, and a
typical fractal geometry is shown in Fig 2a. The author in [5]
has demonstrated a double-loop Koch antenna which was
optimized to operate from 0.9-2.4 GHz.
(a) (b)
Fig. 2: Schematics of the (a) typical Koch fractal geometry and
(b) single-stage voltage doubler.
B. RF Energy Harvesting Circuit
The RF energy harvesting circuit is composed of a
matching network and a RF-DC converter. The biggest
challenge when designing the RF-DC converter is to generate a
suitably high DC output voltage from a very low input RF
power. Diodes are typically used for rectification and they
themselves as well as the circuit configuration can affect the
conversion efficiency dramatically. Hence, in order to drive
electronic devices, the circuit should be designed carefully.
Generally, there are two main categories for the RF-DC
converter. One uses a single-ended topology; the other a
differential topology [10]. Single-ended rectifiers, like
commonly used voltage multipliers, have two basic schemes:
Villard cascade (or Cockcroft-Walton) voltage multiplier and
Dickson cascade voltage multiplier. Both schemes are based on
the same “building block” that is shown in Fig. 2 (b); the
Villard voltage multiplier uses series block connection, while
Dickson voltage multiplier uses parallel block connection.
Ideally, any voltage level can be achieved by adding enough
stages.
A differential rectifier, usually realized in CMOS, is
comprised of a cross-coupled diode bridge configuration driven
by a differential RF input. This scheme exhibits a low
activation threshold, which results in high conversion
efficiency, especially when operating at low power levels [10].
In [11], the author proposed an improved rectifier circuit
based on a conventional voltage multiplier mentioned above.
The conversion efficiency has been optimized by introducing
an extra inductor, which aims to store energy in a magnetic
978-1-5090-3219-8/16/$31.00 ©2016 IEEE
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field during the negative cycle and discharge in the subsequent
positive cycle. This can generate an opposition voltage polarity
limiting current variation. As a result, the peak conversion
efficiency of the proposed rectifier circuit is about 81.65% for
0 dBm input power at 868 MHz. Another design involving the
differential rectifier can be found in [12], where an extra DC-
DC converter was combined with a 3-stage differential rectifier
to boost the output voltage without considerably jeopardizing
efficiency. In addition, the start-up voltage of this scheme is
low at 200 mV and the power consumption is less than 10 nW.
This harvester has 68% peak efficiency at 900 MHz.
IV. CONCLUSION
This paper gives a brief review of RF energy harvesting
techniques. The general structure of the RF energy harvesting
system has been introduced in Section II. Both antenna and
circuit designs have been classified and discussed in Section
III. The gain of the antennas and conversion efficiencies of
circuits can provide sufficient energy to power typical wireless
sensor platforms and achieve self-sustainability.
REFERENCES
[1] Kim, Sangkil, et al. "Ambient RF energy-harvesting technologies for
self-sustainable standalone wireless sensor platforms." Proceedings of
the IEEE 102.11 (2014): 1649-1666.
[2] T. K. Sarkar, J. Zhong, K. Kim, A. Medouri, M. Salazar-Palma, “A
survey of various propagation models for mobile communication,” IEEE
Antennas and Propagation Magazine, vol. 45, no. 3, pp. 51-82, June
2003
[3] J. Jose, S. George, L. Bosco, J. Bhandari, F. Fernandes, and A.
Kotrashetti, “A review of RF energy harvesting systems in India,” 2015
Int. Conf. Technol. Sustain. Dev., pp. 1–4, 2015.
[4] C. A. Balanis, Antenna theory: Analysis and design. 4rd ed. John Wiley
& Sons, 2016.
[5] Volakis J L, O'Brien A J, Chen C. C. ”Small and Adaptive Antennas
and Arrays for GNSS Applications” Proceedings of the IEEE, 2016,
104(6): 1221-1232.
[6] A. Georgiadis, S. Member, G. Andia, and A. Collado, “Rectenna Design
and Optimization Using Reciprocity Theory and Harmonic Balance
Analysis for Electromagnetic ( EM ) Energy Harvesting,” vol. 9, pp.
444–446, 2010.
[7] Hebelka V, Velim J, Raida Z. “Dual band Koch antenna for RF energy
harvesting”2016 10th European Conference on Antennas and
Propagation (EuCAP). IEEE, 2016: 1-3.
[8] Simorangkir, R. B., Abbas, S. M., & Esselle, K. P. “A printed UWB
antenna with full ground plane for WBAN applications” 2016
International Workshop on Antenna Technology (iWAT). IEEE, 2016:
127-130.
[9] Khan, H. A., Ullah, S., Afridi, M. A., & Saleem, S. “Patch antenna using
EBG structure for ISM band wearable applications” 2016 International
Conference on Intelligent Systems Engineering (ICISE). IEEE, 2016:
157-160.
[10] H. Dai, Y. Lu, M. K. Law, S. W. Sin, U. Seng-Pan, and R. P. Martins,
“A review and design of the on-chip rectifiers for RF energy
harvesting,” 2015 IEEE Int. Wirel. Symp. IWS 2015, pp. 3–6, 2015.
[11] I. Chaour, S. Bdiri, A. Fakhfakh, and O. Kanoun, “Modified Rectifier
Circuit for High Efficiency and Low Power RF Energy Harvester,” 13th
Int. Multi-Conferrence Syst. Signals Devices, pp. 619–623, 2016.
[12] D. Michelon, E. Bergeret, A. Di Giacomo, and P. Pannier, “RF energy
harvester with sub-threshold step-up converter,” 2016 IEEE Int. Conf.
RFID, pp. 1–8, 2016.
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