Design of compact and conformal rectennas

Abstract

In this final year project, research has been done and presented on the design of rectenna for Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) devices. It describes the design and simulation process of antenna and rectifier circuit at the operating frequency of 2.45GHz. The gain and the bandwidth of the receiving antenna are important factors that contributes to the efficiency of a rectenna, thus various bandwidth and gain enhancement techniques are outlined, and in particular U-slot and air gap insertion, are applied on a coaxial probe feed patch antenna. Effect of key design parameters such as effect of air gap height, slot dimensions, etc., of the antenna have been investigated and discussed. A rectifier circuit is simulated using ADS software. A L-shaped impedance matching network is put in place to improve the return loss characteristics of the rectifier circuit. The results for before and after impedance matching are discussed. Finally, recommendations for future work are given to further improve this design.