Design and Implementation of RF Energy Harvesting System for Low-Power Electronic Devices

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Web End = Journal of ELECTRONIC MATERIALS, Vol. 45, No. 8, 2016

DOI: 10.1007/s11664-016-4441-5

2016 The Minerals, Metals & Materials Society

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Web End = Design and Implementation of RF Energy Harvesting System for Low-Power Electronic Devices

YUNUS UZUN1,2

1.Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, Aksaray University, 68100 Aksaray, Turkey. 2.e-mail: [email protected]

Radio frequency (RF) energy harvester systems are a good alternative for energizing of low-power electronics devices. In this work, an RF energy harvester is presented to obtain energy from Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) 900 MHz signals. The energy harvester, consisting of a two-stage Dickson voltage multiplier circuit and L-type impedance matching circuits, was designed, simulated, fabricated and tested experimentally in terms of its performance. Simulation and experimental works were carried out for various input power levels, load resistances and input frequencies. Both simulation and experimental works have been carried out for this frequency band. An efciency of 45% is obtained from the system at 0 dBm input power level using the impedance matching circuit. This corresponds to the power of 450 lW and this value is sufcient for many low-power devices. The most important parameters affecting the efciency of the RF energy harvester are the input power level, frequency band, impedance matching and voltage multiplier circuits, load resistance and the selection of diodes. RF energy harvester designs should be optimized in terms of these parameters.

Key words: RF energy harvester, efciency, impedance matching, voltage multiplier

INTRODUCTION

The energy requirements of low-power devices are supplied by chemical batteries. But the life of batteries is nite and it is mostly difcult or impossible to change or recharge the batteries of the devices. This is a big problem in terms of labor, time and costs when the low-power devices are located at a difcult access environment.14 Moreover, the chemical batteries contain heavy metals, which can pollute the environment.5 The energy harvester systems overcome the problem of battery replacement and eliminate the system dependency on external power supply, which make the system self-powered.6 There are many types of...