3D Printed Bifunctional Triple-Band Heatsink Antenna for RF and Thermal Energy Harvesting

Abstract

Future IoT environment requires billions of wireless sensor nodes where energy consumption of these devices will be a concern. This problem can be solved by harvesting energy from ambient environment to power sensor nodes. Ambient RF and thermal energy have a great potential, as both of them are available in most of the places. When combining these two energy harvesters into one module, optimized design is required. This work presents a heatsink antenna, which serves as a part of a triple-band RF energy harvester (GSM900, GSM1800 and 3G) and as a heatsink which boosts the performance of the thermal energy harvester. The antenna has been designed by using Ansys HFSS and Solidworks in parallel for optimal RF and thermal performances.

Radio-frequency Energy Harvester for a Hybrid Power Supply with Constant Voltage Output to a Water Meter

“…A thermal source has been used as a bias for diodes to change the diode operating point in hybrid energy harvesters, resulting in increased RF-DC PCE for hybrid energy harvesting [20,21]. To harvest the thermal energy and RF energy, a triple-band heatsink antenna is proposed, which serves as a part of a triple-band RF energy harvester and also acts as a heatsink that boosts the performance of the thermal energy harvester [22,23]. However, the output voltage with these strategies is unstable, and it is difficult to drive the load in practice.…”