Design and implementation of an RF-DC energy harvester

Abstract

With a rapid advancement in recent growth in technology, wireless communication is getting more common as compared to wired communication. The use of old-school communication with a wired-connected device is slowly depleting and wireless communication is beginning to rise in recent years. Wireless communication device such as Bluetooth, Wi-Fi router, mobile phones which uses 2.4GHz Radio Frequency (RF) spectrum also starts to increase in usage. Due to the wide availability of this signal in the surroundings, it can be put into greater use to reuse and recycle out from free space. With a collection of research and simulations, this suggests that power can be harvested from a wireless device transmitting signal.

A Final Year Project (FYP) study on how energy harvesting from the 2.4GHz frequency spectrum was conducted. This project focuses on implementing a hardware to harvest RF energy with available 2.4GHz RF spectrum. Several components will be used in this project to store the energy harvested and a voltage multiplier might be required to achieve desired output voltage. The values of the DC output voltage and power in accordance to the RF power received is simulated with tuned parameters to provide optimum output.