Radio frequency (RF) power harvesting allows wireless power delivery concurrently to several remote RF devices. This manuscript presents the implementation of a compact, reliable, effective, and flexible energy harvesting (EH) rectenna design. It integrates a simple rectifier circuit with a circularly polarized one-sided slot dipole antenna at 2.45 GHz Industrial, Scientific, Medical (ISM) frequency band for wireless charging operation at low incident power densities, from 1 to 95 μ W/cm 2 . The rectenna structure is printed on a single layer, low cost, commercial FR4 substrate. The integration of the rectifier and antenna produces a low-profile and high performance circularly polarized rectenna. In order to maximize the system efficiency, the matching circuit introduced between the rectifier and antenna is optimized for a minimum number of discrete components and it is constructed using multiple of L-slot defects in the ground plane. For a given input power of − 6 dBm intercepted by the circularly polarized antenna with 3 dBi gain, the peak RF-DC (radio frequency-direct current) conversion efficiency is 59.5 % . The rectenna dimensions are 41 × 35.5 mm 2 . It is demonstrated that the output power from the proposed rectenna is higher than the other published designs with a similar antenna size under the same ambient condition. Thanks to its compact size, the proposed rectenna finds a range of potential applications for wireless energy charging.
A HIGH-PERFORMANCE CIRCULARLY-POLARIZED RECTENNA FOR WIRELESS ENERGY HARVESTING AT 1.85 AND 2.45 GHZ FREQUENCY BANDS