Circularly polarized shorted ring slot rectenna with a mesh design for optimized inkjet printing on paper substrate

The design of a 2.45 GHz circularly polarized rectenna inkjet printed on paper is presented. The proposed antenna structure is a shorted ring slot with a modified ground plane where a mesh design is employed in order to reduce the required amount of silver nanoparticle ink that needs to be inkjet-printed. A meshed ground plane with 29 % conducting surface relative to a solid ground was demonstrated with a simulated gain of 2.2 dB, axial ratio of 0.6 dB at 2.45 GHz and a peak rectifier efficiency of 45 % for -15 dBm input received power at the antenna terminals.