Fully inkjet printed wide band cantor fractal antenna for RF energy harvesting application

Energy harvesting from ambient RF signals is feasible, particularly from the GSM bands such as 900MHz, 1800MHz and the 3G band at 2.1GHz. This requires a wideband receive antenna which can cover all these bands with decent gain performance and an omnidirectional radiation pattern. In this work, a novel Cantor fractal antenna has been designed which fulfills the above mentioned performance requirements. Antenna has been realized through a combination of 3D inkjet printing of plastic substrate and 2D inkjet printing of metallic nanoparticles based ink. The stable impedance and radiation performance of the antenna over a bandwidth of 0.8GHz to 2.2GHz (93 %) shows the feasibility of its employment in wide band energy harvesting applications.