An Omnidirectional Rectenna Array With an Enhanced RF Power Distributing Strategy for RF Energy Harvesting
Hucheng Sun, Jie Huang, Yong Wang
Abstract
This communication presents an omnidirectional rectenna array with an enhanced RF power distributing strategy. The proposed rectenna array consists of three bidirectional subarray antennas, a <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$3\times $ </tex-math></inline-formula> 3 RF power distributing network, and a three-element rectifier array. Utilizing the <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$3\times $ </tex-math></inline-formula> 3 network to redistribute the varying RF power received by the three antennas, the RF-to-dc power conversion efficiency of the rectenna array can be enhanced under the illumination of electromagnetic (EM) waves with arbitrary incident angles. Measurement results reveal that the proposed rectenna array has an improved omnidirectional-harvesting capability compared with the design without RF power distributing strategy, thus can be readily used for RF energy-harvesting applications.