Loop Antenna Over Artificial Magnetic Conductor Surface and Its Application to Dual-Band RF Energy Harvesting

Abstract

This paper studies loop antennas over artificial magnetic conductor (AMC) surfaces with the objective of designing a dual-band RF energy harvesting antenna. The AMC surface is well known to achieve low-profile and higher gain wire antennas. From a practical point of view, impedance matching is of paramount importance to achieve highly efficient reception of weak ambient RF energy. First, the driving-point impedance of a loop antenna over an AMC surface was studied, where a conventional method using image theory to estimate the impedance was found to be not always useful for loop antennas. As the AMC surface is within the reactive near field, mutual coupling between the antenna and the AMC unit cells is significant, which the conventional method does not take into account. Then, we proposed a novel use of a polarization-dependent AMC surface for dual-band RF energy harvesting. An AMC surface with a rectangular unit cell was adopted for two orthogonal polarizations with different frequencies. Finally, the AMC surface and the loop antennas were successfully implemented as a dual-band energy harvesting panel together with RF-to-dc conversion circuits and a power management circuit.