Nano Energy Harvesting with Plasmonic Nano-Antennas: A review of MID-IR Rectenna and Application

Abstract

Drones, a technical nickname for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are gaining more and more interest and popularity. Supported by the miniaturization and cost reduction of electronic components, a new class of UAVs called Nano-air vehicles or NAVs represent the future technology for indoor and outdoor mission. One of the main considerations when building or buying a drone is the flight time and range. The flight time is nowadays a drawback for miniature unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). It is limited to a few minutes before requiring a forced recovery to replace exhausted batteries. Currently the batteries are the dominant technology, which possess limited operation in time and energy. The real viability to extending flight time (FT) of NAVs is possibly exploring new and more disruptive alternative solution able either to recharge a battery, or even to directly power the NAVs during the flight. A Plasmonic Nano Energy harvester is an attractive technology to extending the FT extracting the energy in mid-infrared radiation emitted from Earth's surface with Rectenna tuned to mid-infrared wavelengths (7 -14 ) m µ with a peak wavelength of about10 m µ . In this review the concepts emerging from this work identify and suggest how this novel harvester can constantly supply these flying objects for the whole day.

A Novel Energy Harvester for Powering Small UAVs: Performance Analysis, Model Validation and Flight Results

“…In order to determine the thrust and the power consumption of the MAV, the weight of each component must be estimated. Table 1 shows the total weight of the MAV and all its components [3].…”

“…In this way, it is possible to identify what are the factors (maneuvers, movements and flight profile) that can involve more energy investment, and therefore faster battery discharge. The factors that determine the power consumption of a drone can be grouped as [3,18]:Impact of Motion: The motions of a drone can be divided into hovering, vertical and horizontal moving. This paper investigates the power consumption of a drone in each motion type.Impact of Weight: We study how different weights of payloads limit their travel distance.Impact of Wind: The major environmental factor that affects the drone is wind.…”

“…Considering a large area to be monitored as fast as possible, with the current technology, a single drone will be not able to land, recharge the battery and take off again in a few minutes. Therefore, to make this unmanned technology more attractive it is mandatory to find a solution for the problem of how to increase the mission parameters [2,3,4]. The authors suggest two directions, which are extensively detailed below.…”

“…Starting from the proposed model, mission parameters can be increased with an energy harvesting (EH) technique. This technique is capable of extending the mission parameters considering a renewable, intermittent source of energy [3,5,6,7,8,9,10]. The Sun is the most important renewable energy source to generate the electricity necessary for any human activity.…”

Replacing noble metals with alternative metals in MID-IR frequency: A theoretical approach

“…The Drude-Lorentz model describes the electrical properties of these metals. This study is addressed to research the permittivity response of one different class of materials proposed as alternative to noble metals at MID-IR electromagnetic region, with the aim to increase the efficiency of resonant micro-antennas [5][6][7][8]. To increase the efficiency of resonant micro-antennas, the low-loss permittivity materials available at terahertz frequencies should be considered.…”