Contributions to rectennas and the use of 5G technology in the RF energy harvesting context

Abstract

Currently, the use of alternative energy sources has provided several technological advances in the area of low power wireless devices, motivated by the elimination of power cables, supercapacitors, and batteries, which in many cases, command the useful life of the devices, thus increasing their maintenance and recharging periods. Consequently, researches to increase the feasibility, the range, and to improve the use of these sources, extracting the maximum of their advantages, are in evidence, motivating studies and technical developments in several areas of knowledgement. Among the possible alternatives, the Radio Frequency Energy Harvesting, using rectennas to capture the electromagnetic energy in the ambient, has been increasing its position. In this context, strategies arise to increase the energy efficiency of the systems and devices. Thus, in this project to FAPESP, the contributions will be in two lines whose researches are completely open, being few explored in the literature in the context of RF Energy Harvesting. The first one will be in the analysis of the rectena behavior as function of temperature, studying and observing the performance variation, as well as, proposing solutions to improve the power transfer, based on the use of a temperature adaptive matching network on the RF rectifier. On the other hand, the second one will focus on the study of the 5G technology application, focusing on Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access (NOMA). In this way, we aim to take some steps in searching of self-sufficiency for wireless communication systems, in a modern context, focusing with alternative energy sources applied to low-power electronic devices. (AU)