Self-charging IoT devices Powering more  Courses, 5G signals A difference

Scientists at Georgia Tech have developed an antenna that can translate millimeter-wave 5G signals into usable electrical power. A 3D printed antenna could transform 5G signals into a wireless power source. According to Georgia Tech, the advancement would eradicate the need for batteries in low-power IoT devices.

The antenna is known as an mm-wave harvester, which is the size of a playing card and has visible circuitry printed on it. The technology was best known as a component of phased array radar systems. The technology opened the pores as the visibility expanded to catch multiple devices at sight. All this occurred without physically shifting the antenna system. It got invented in the 1960s by US Air Force and MIT Researcher Walter Rotman.

“People have attempted to do energy harvesting at high frequencies like 24 or 35GHz before,” said Aline Eid, a senior researcher at Georgia Tech’s ATHENA lab in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering.The shortcomings of the previous iterations showed a weakness in flexibility and vision expansiveness. It worked only if the lens was oriented directly towards the transmitter. We could see a significant change in that.

Millimeter-wave 5G signals are best suited for energy harvesting as they have more energy density than the previous generations of licensed wireless technology.  The extracted design from Georgia Tech lines up extremely well with power sources. It works more like an optical lens with six simultaneous fields of view. The expedition was only possible due to the different curvature angles on the beam port and antenna sides of the device. Statistics exhibit that IoT devices are ever-growing, and we could see around 5.4 billion in use by 2025 in North America alone.