A wideband high gain dielectric resonator antenna for RF energy harvesting application

A novel high gain and broadband hybrid dielectric resonator antenna (DRA) is designed and experimentally validated. To obtain the wide impedance bandwidth, the proposed antenna geometry combines the dielectric resonator antenna and an underlying slot with a narrow rectangular notch, which effectively broadens the impedance bandwidth by merging the resonances of the slot and DRA. An inverted T-shaped feed line is used to excite both antennas, simultaneously. It supports amalgamation of different resonant modes of the both, DRA and slot antenna. The measured results show that the proposed antenna offers an impedance bandwidth of 120% from 1.67 to 6.7 GHz. The antenna gain is next enhanced by a reflector placed below the antenna at an optimum distance. On engineering the height and dimension of this reflector the antenna gain is improved from 2.2 dBi to 8.7 dBi at 1.7 GHz. Finally, antenna operation is attested experimentally with a rectifier circuit in the frequency range of 1.8-3.6 GHz, where various strong radio signals are freely available for RF energy harvesting. The measured maximum efficiency of the rectifier and rectenna circuit were found to be 74.4% and 61.4%, respectively.