Tightly coupled antennas for low cost and highly efficient energy harvesters

We propose the use of tightly coupled antennas as an efficient electromagnetic energy harvester. Different from conventional rectenna systems the antennas are placed close to each other providing high capacitive coupling. This coupling along with the backed ground plane is utilized to produce a surface impedance matched to the free space impedance, thus full absorption is achieved. In addition, the size of the unit cell is large compared to the free space wavelength providing simplified and low cost solutions for channeling the power among the antennas.