Design and Development of Self-Sustained RF Energy Harvested Rectenna for Sensor Node Application

Today, radio frequency energy harvesting (RFEH) is seen as an emerging method for powering wireless ubiquitous Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices. However, the major roadblock is the availability of adequate power density, antenna, and the receiver’s sensitivity. This article experimentally demonstrates the challenges owing to the low power density of ambient sources and the antenna configuration in retrieving RF power to run and sustain an actual RFEH system. To tackle this, antenna design tradeoffs among size, frequency, and gain have been reported and design rules have been proposed. among, a proof-of-concept of successful demonstration of powering IoT-capable Texas Instrument CC1350 SOC sensor node from a dedicated source backed by experimental measurements of temperature, power generation, and dissipation has been reported. The experimental results show that the proposed RFEH system is capable of running and sustaining more than one sensor node load. The power generated by RFEH after charging the supercapacitor to 3.3 V is approximately 2 mW and is capable of maintaining and running the IoT-enabled sensor node when temperature data is recorded in an interval of 1 min to help replenish the voltage on the supercapacitor. Thus, the experimental measurement results show that energy harvested from the dedicated RF source along with a high-gain antenna can achieve self-sustained IoT operations, eradicating the need for batteries. Finally, the thermal analysis of the harvesting circuitry has also been demonstrated compared with the state-of-the-art RFEH systems.