Wireless Power Harvesting Skin †

Abstract

Contributing to the quest for renewable energy harvesting, we present, in the work at hand, a conceptual model of a large-scale wireless microwave power harvester that takes the structure of a smart reconfigurable harvesting surface. This structure is assembled by numerous elementary harvesters that, as a whole, present both wide solid angle coverage and high receiving antenna gain. This is achieved by employing two levels of organization, both in the horizontal and in the vertical planes. The horizontal plane, which is the host receiving surface, is tiled by employing square radiators and forms hierarchical subarray structures. At the same time, hieratical structures are also employed in the vertical plane where the beamforming network collects the received power in a drainage-basin fashion (one receiving port is fed by its assigned and also its neighboring antenna elements) achieving, in this way, increased efficiency. The presented results verify the contributed design.