Designing EM Energy Harvesting Antenna to Give Power Support to Embedded Sensor

摘要

Abundant availability of Radio Frequency in the environment is utilized for harvesting energy, but the harvested energy level is not sufficient enough to activate the sensor nodes deployed in unreachable locations. The antenna used for harvesting the RF energy should be designed accurately in order to increase the efficiency of harvesting. Microstrip antenna capable of harvesting energy from the 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi frequency band has a low profile with compact size so the microstrip antenna is utilized in this work. The microstrip antenna is modified into an insert feed microstrip antenna for optimizing the harvesting capability which in turn will increase the output power. Therefore an array of insert feed microstrip antenna is connected in series for generating high output power sufficient enough for activating the sensor node. This work measures and displays the harvested energy level using voltage sensor with LPC2148. The antenna initially designed for single frequency band of 2.4 GHz but both 2.4 GHz resonant frequencies at -20.5dB return loss and 5GHz resonant frequency of -20dB.