Radio Frequency Energy Harvesting
As my Senior design project, I worked on experimenting with Radio Frequency Energy Harvesting (RFEH). RFEH is the idea of using an antenna and a voltage manipulation circuit to convert stray electromagnetic waves into usable DC power. Our project goal was to harvest energy from local FM radio towers and to store it into a small storage element such as a supercapacitor. At the end of our project we could harvested enough RF energy to power a digital wrist watch indefinitely from approximately one mile from the power source.
Complete Project Flow Chart
We decided to harvest RF waves from the local 107.1M Hz radio station located approximately one mile line of sight away from us at the Prudential center in Boston.
Below is our schematic for out circuit, for full calculations see THIS DOCUMNET
Our first prototype built on a breadboard with supercapacitor and low current light.
Final prototype; Full circuit mounted on PCB, with 50 ohm BNC for connecting antenna and screw terminals for output.
Myself (right) and my partner Jason Abele (left) displaying our project at senior design showcase. To show functionality of our project we connected a digital wrist watch to the circuit output. Our final project poster can be viewd HERE.
