Plasmonic Enhanced Infrared Rectennas: Energy Harvesting, Terahertz Detection and Thermal Imaging

The overall goal at the end of this multi-phase program is to develop an energy harvester composed of rectenna arrays that are connected in parallel that harness significant amounts of infrared electromagnetic energy. The ultimate systems will be capable of harvesting watts, kilowatts of energy using these structures fabricated in parallel on a large scale, or for smaller scale application specific powering needs. In Phase I we will fabricate enhanced micro-antenna arrays along with their rectifying diodes and prototype simple arrays of infrared rectenna pixels. We will continue to improve the design through modeling and testing. In Phase II we will finalize initial design and focus on applying large-scale manufacturing techniques such as nano-imprinting to produce the energy harvesters for military and commercial implementation. We will focus this product largely on IR of wavelengths corresponding to approximately 10microns. However, many of the techniques developed will be applicable to other parts of the spectrum.