Medium Wave Energy Scavenging for Wireless Structural Health Monitoring Sensors

Energy scavenging presents a promising approach for powering the wireless sensors used for structural health monitoring. RF energy scavenging has recently been intensively studied due to the abundance of ambient RF energy. In this paper, an RF scavenger operating at the AM frequency band has been fabricated and tested. The scavenger is composed of an RF front end and an energy processing circuit. The RF front-end design has been optimized for operation in low RF power densities. The energy processing circuit, which consist of a boost converter and a control circuit with low power overhead, requires a minimum input power of -39 dBm for proper operation.