Improvement of RF wireless power transmission using a circularly polarized retrodirective antenna array with EBG structures

Abstract

This paper presents the performance improvement of a circularly polarized (CP) retrodirective array (RDA) through the suppression of mutual coupling effects. The RDA is designed based on CP Koch-shaped patch antenna elements with an inter-element spacing as small as 0.4l for a compact size (l is the wavelength in free space at the designed frequency of 5.2 GHz). Electromagnetic band gap (EBG) structures are applied to reduce the mutual coupling between the antenna elements, thus improving the circular polarization characteristic of the RDA. Two CP RDAs with EBGs, in the case 5 × 5 and 10 × 10 arrays, are used as wireless power transmitters to transmit a total power of 50 W. A receiver is located at a distance of 1 m away from the transmitter to harvest the transmitted power. At the broadside direction, the simulated results demonstrate that the received powers are improved by approximately 11.32% and 12.45% when using the 5 × 5 and 10 × 10 CP RDAs with the EBGs, respectively, as the transmitters.