  Rate-splitting multiple access (RSMA) and reconfigurable intelligent surface
(RIS) have been both recognized as promising techniques for 6G. The benefits of
combining the two techniques to enhance the spectral and energy efficiency have
been recently exploited in communication-only networks. Inspired by the recent
advances on RIS empowered RSMA, in this work we investigate the use of RIS
empowered RSMA for simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT)
with one transmitter concurrently sending information to multiple information
receivers (IRs) and transferring energy to multiple energy receivers (ERs).
Specifically, we jointly optimize the transmit beamformers and the RIS
reflection coefficients to maximize the weighted sum-rate (WSR) of IRs under
the harvested energy constraint of ERs and the transmit power constraint. An
alternating optimization and successive convex approximation (SCA)-based
optimization framework is then proposed to solve the problem. Numerical results
show that by marrying the benefits of RSMA and RIS, the proposed RIS empowered
RSMA achieves a better tradeoff between the WSR of IRs and energy harvested at
ERs. Therefore, we conclude that RIS empowered RSMA is a promising strategy for
SWIPT.
