RF-powered wearable energy harvesting and storage module based on e-textile coplanar waveguide rectenna and supercapacitor

Abstract

This paper presents a high-efficiency compact(0.016λ₀²) textile-integrated energy harvesting and storage module for RF power transfer. A flexible 50 μm-thick coplanar waveguide rectenna filament is integrated with a spray-coated supercapacitor to realize an “e-textile” energy supply module. The meandered antenna maintains an S11< −6 dB inside and outside the fabric and in human proximity with a 2.3 dBi gain. The rectifier achieves a peak RF-DC efficiency of 80%, across a 4.5 kΩload, and a 1.8 V open-circuit voltage from −7 dBm. The supercapacitor is directly spray-coated on a cotton substrate using carbon and an aqueous electrolyte. When connected to the supercapacitor, the rectifier achieves over an octave half-power bandwidth. The textile-integrated rectenna is demonstrated charging the supercapacitor to 1.5 V (8.4 mJ) in 4 minutes, at 4.2 m from a license-free source, demonstrating a significant improvement over previous rectennas while eliminating power management circuitry. The integrated module has an end-to-end efficiency of 38% at 1.8 m from the transmitter. On-body, the rectenna’s efficiency is 4.8%, inclusive of in-body losses and transient shadowing, harvesting4 mJ in 32 seconds from 16.6 μW/cm². It is concluded that e-textile rectennas are the most efficient method for powering wearables from μW/cm² power densities

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Identifiers

ORCID for Mahmoud Wagih: orcid.org/0000-0002-7806-4333

ORCID for Nicholas Hillier: orcid.org/0000-0002-3544-8329

ORCID for Sheng Yong: orcid.org/0000-0002-8588-5981

ORCID for Alex S. Weddell: orcid.org/0000-0002-6763-5460

ORCID for Steve Beeby: orcid.org/0000-0002-0800-1759

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