A Novel Design of Radio Frequency Energy Relays on Power Transmission Lines

In this paper, we investigate the energy problem of monitoring sensors on high-voltage power transmission lines and propose a wireless charging scheme for a Radio Frequency IDentification (RFID) sensor tag to solve a commercial efficiency problem: the maintenance-caused power outage. Considering the environmental influences on power transmission lines, a self-powered wireless energy relay is designed to meet the energy requirement of the passive RFID sensor tag. The relay can obtain the electric field energy from the transmission lines and wirelessly power the RFID sensor tags around for longer operating distance. A prototype of the energy relay is built and tested on a 110 kv line. The measurement results show that the energy relay can provide stable energy even with the influences of wind, noise and power outage. To our knowledge, it is the first work to power the RFID sensor tags on power transmission lines.