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Widebandharvesting Full Paper EUCAP16 FINAL
Widebandharvesting Full Paper EUCAP16 FINAL
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Abstract—This paper presents an energy harvesting device the antenna design. The operation of the antenna in the vicinity
for body centric sensor systems. The focus of collecting energy is of human body causes its electromagnetic coupling with the
put in the sensor far-field and in a large frequency bandwidth. body and alters the antenna characteristics [7]. This occurrence
The proposed device comprises of the logarithmic spiral textile
reduces the antenna radiation efficiency and influences its
antenna paired with a simple rectifier circuit. The antenna is
designed and manufactured by embroidered conductive yarn matching due to radiation into the body. In [8] it was shown
into denim material. The antenna prototype has been tested. that placing the antenna on the outermost layer of clothes (e.g.
Several rectifier circuit topologies were simulated and the DC jacket) can reduce the coupling of the antenna with the body,
voltage at the rectifier output is obtained by simulation. meaning that such influence can be somewhat overcome. An
Index Terms— logarithmic spiral antenna, textile antenna, additional challenge is the integration of the antenna into
rectenna, energy harvesting. clothes by use of conductive textile materials which possess
finite conductivity that can also degrade with washing [9].
I. INTRODUCTION As a compromise among these issues we have designed a
wideband planar logarithmic spiral antenna [10] which
The principal application of radio waves from their operates from around 500 MHz up to 8 GHz. This antenna is
beginning was for wireless transmission of information, giving capable of simultaneously collecting spatial electromagnetic
rise, among others, to ever-growing use of personal mobile energy from various existing wireless systems which improves
devices and sensors as well as in research in their integration the received total power. Due to its wide band the antenna is
into so-called body-centric sensor network [1]. Although the robust to detuning [11] when placed on body and suitable for
miniaturization of electronic components and antennas has being placed on the jacket. Furthermore, it is light-weight and
made a huge variety of applications possible, one of the main possesses an aesthetic component which makes it unobtrusive
challenges in implementation of such systems is the power and fully wearable.
supply. Larger batteries with larger capacity in general make
the device too bulky and obtrusive. Therefore the proposed
II. COMPONENTS OF ENERGY HARVESTER
solutions go in direction of collecting the energy from the
available outer sources, which could in turn reduce the The main principle of electromagnetic energy harvester
dependence on battery power, or ideally, eliminate it. (also known as “rectenna” - combination of the antenna paired
Alongside e.g. mechanical energy of walking, solar and wind with the rectifier [3, 6]) is to convert RF and microwave power
energy, the electromagnetic energy in space is also recognized density incident on textile antenna into usable DC power at the
as a possible source of power supply for some body-centric end of energy harvester circuit. The first step in design is to
device [2 – 6]. estimate and possibly measure the energy density in the
In this paper we present wearable energy harvesting system prospective environment of the energy harvester. This provides
that is developed to wirelessly power on-body sensors. The information in which frequency band the energy harvester
system consists of the antenna and the rectifier circuit which device can potentially achieve highest yield in amount of
converts the collected AC energy into DC energy, which is collected power. As the idea is to primarily use
suitable for powering a device. The conversion efficiency is electromagnetic energy of the existing communication systems
however inherently rather low [3], which is the result of the (DVB-T, GSM, UMTS, ISM, UWB, etc.) the frequencies of
diode nonlinearity, low input voltage and difficulty to obtain interest turn out to be from around 500 MHz up to at least
proper impedance matching with a nonlinear element such as around 5 GHz. This means that wideband antenna suitable for
Schottky diode. Thus it is desirable first to focus onto design of wearing on the body is sought.
the antenna which is capable of receiving an adequate amount The efficiency of the energy harvester device needs to be
of power, to make the device useful. as high as possible due to constraint of limited theoretically
Since the antenna and harvesting circuit are also intended collected power. Nevertheless, due to nonlinearity of diodes in
to be wearable on body, this poses an additional challenge in rectifier circuit matching is difficult to obtain across the whole
This work has been fully supported by Croatian Science Foundation range, thus we first rely on optimizing the antenna itself to
under the project 6198 Textile Antennas for Smart Environment. collect enough power, while the efficiency and matching issues
are to be addressed in next stage. The central part of the [10] is around -2 to 2 dBi within the observed range, which is
proposed energy harvester is a wideband antenna which is around 45 dB lower than predicted by simulations (Table I).
represented as an equivalent multiple Thevenin source In fact, this drop in gain is realistic and expected due to the
(representing various wireless energy sources), as shown in imperfections in sewing process and the conductivity of used
Fig. 1. The antenna is followed by matching and rectifier yarn of three orders of magnitude lower than copper [13],
circuit and a DC-DC up voltage converter. which was not taken into account while simulating the antenna.
RA≈188Ω
With enhancements in antenna embroidering process and use
DVB – T; of better conductive yarn, the antenna can have even better
Balun +
GSM; Rectifier DC-DC up-
UMTS PAC
Matching
converter PDC
Load characteristics. Nevertheless, the obtained gain can be deemed
circuit
etc.
acceptable for the prototype stage and in line with similar
textile antenna realizations [1, 8, 9].
Fig. 1. Scheme of considered energy harvester device
Frequency [GHz] Voltage [mV] To improve the obtained voltage level we have
subsequently turned attention to other circuit topologies, and
0.8 200
have chosen two topologies with best potential for physical
0.9 200 implementation. They are namely: three-stage Cockroft-
1.8 200 Walton topology and symmetrical Cockroft-Walton topology
1.9 200 [20]. These circuits are named by physicists that were used the
cascade for most of their research, although the circuit was
2.4 200 discovered earlier, in 1919 by Greinacher [21]. We have also
2.6 200 tested using more stages of each topology, however the output
5.5 200 voltages were not higher anymore (they were even lower due
6 200 to the internal circuit losses).
The DC-DC up voltage converter [21] is based on voltage
multiplier to deliver acceptable voltage for charging a battery,
The first test comprises of rectifier simulation with one and capacitor or as a power supply for wireless sensor. In Figs. 8
two Schottky diodes (half-wave and full-wave circuit and 9 we show the three stage Cockroft-Walton cascade
topologies), example of which is given in Fig. 6, where full- rectifier and its symmetrical version that uses DC-DC voltage
up conversion, respectively. The main purpose of cascading
the same pattern of diodes and capacitors is for generating a
high DC voltage from a low AC voltage that is required as a
driving source. Accordingly, with more stages, the capacitor
values need to be increased, so the highest output voltage after
Vout, V
transient period was given by 100 pF capacitor values shown
in Fig. 9. With higher capacities, the output voltage ripple is
lower (too high capacitor value does not benefit to output
voltage).
The comparison of transient voltage responses for the two
considered topologies after optimization is given in Figs. 10
and 11, respectively. Furthermore, the optimized transient
voltage response after each stage of the symmetrical rectifier is
shown in Fig. 11. Note that although the circuit from Fig. 9 is Fig. 10. Transient voltage response at the rectifier output of a three stage
Cockroft-Walton rectifier circuit
considerably more complicated to previous one, the output
voltage turns not to be any larger despite variety of capacity 1.2
values being used.
1.0
L C R L C R
0.8
Vin L C R Vout
+ 0.6
Antenna
_connections 0.4
L C R L C R L C R
0.2
0.0
Fig. 8. Electrical schematic of a three stage Cockroft-Walton cascade
rectifier made using HSMS-285 Schottky diode. The values of passive -0.2
time, usec
_
Antenna Vin
+