Far-Field Wireless Power Transfer for the Internet of Things

Abstract

A complete end-to-end far-field wireless power transfer (WPT) is proposed and studied in this paper for the application of the Internet of Things (IoT) at the industrial, scientific, and medical (ISM) band of 2.4 GHz. The radiative WPT has achieved a remarkable attraction for the capability to transfer power in the long range. We propose two approaches. In the first approach, a 2×4 microstrip patch transmitter antenna array with a high gain and a narrow beamwidth is proposed that is rotated toward the IoT device using a small stepper motor. The performance of the rectifier in the receiving circuit was separately analyzed, and 17.54% efficiency was achieved with a load of 0.6 kΩ for the circuit, while the input power was 10 dBm. The overall system test was performed and the targeted result was investigated considering the distance between the transmitter and the receiver, and an input radio frequency (RF) power of 5 dBm to 15 dBm at 2.4 GHz. The second approach uses a 1×4 transmitter antenna array fed through a Butler matrix to provide four individual beams with a 22.5∘ angular separation, and 90∘ total angular coverage. The goal was to focus the power into four angular locations and to reduce the power waste in other directions. A mobile app was developed to control the direction of the beam. A system efficiency of as much as 19% was measured for an input RF power of 0 dBm and a resistive load of 62 kΩ.