Electric Field Energy Harvesting from High-Voltage Power Lines for Batteryless LoRaWAN

This work proposes an efficient electric field energy harvester underneath high-voltage power lines for batteryless LoRaWAN communications and sensing applications. Comprehensive theoretical analysis is set to help identify the optimized design (size, separation, and permittivity) of the energy harvester and accurately predict its harvesting performance. A complete batteryless platform has been developed, including an aluminum plates-based harvester, a full bridge rectifier, an ultra-low-power hysteresis comparator, and an Arduino LoRaWAN module. The energy harvester can collect 48-uW power from 525-kV high-voltage power lines. Our preliminary experiments demonstrate that this proposed harvester can successfully drive the LoRaWAN module every 40 minutes for potential kilometers of wireless communications.