Development of a Radio Frequency Rectifier Circuit for Radio Frequency Energy Harvesting

The aim of this work is to develop a radio frequency rectifier circuit for radio frequency energy harvesting that can produce voltage from ambient radio frequency (RF) signal to energize low powered sensor devices or Internet of Things networks. The radio frequency rectifier was first designed and simulated in Proteus CAD software environment in other to assess the circuits theoretical performance. The designed circuit was then developed on a vero board and the power conversion efficiency of the circuit was evaluated. The rectifier circuit was simulated, and its performance evaluated under various input condition. The rectifier circuit was also simulated with a boost converter circuit attached to the output and the output voltage improved significantly by about 321%. The maximum voltage output from the developed rectifier circuit was 0.29V. The power conversion efficiency of the developed radio frequency rectifier circuit was evaluated to be 40%. It is highly recommended that further works should be done on optimizing the receiving antenna and the impedance matching network of the RF energy harvester.