Numerical Investigation on Flat-Top Beam Arrays for Wireless Power Transfer in the Millimeter-Wave Range

This thesis aims to analyze a far-field WPT link at mm-Wave proposing a transmitter i.e. 10x10 planar dipole antenna array operating at 31 GHz that radiates a ‘flat-top beam’ for uniform power distribution on the receiver side. The proposed link's reception system is made up of a number of single patch antennas that are arranged in space to completely cover the area invested by the flat radiation. To investigate the behavior of the flat-top beam, two different excitation configurations (in terms of amplitude and phase) were applied. The two configurations were named “Configuration 1” (in which the excitation was applied in a 1-dimensional way) and “Configuration 2D” (which had the excitation applied in a 2-dimensional manner) and the flatness was optimized through amplitude and phase variation. The receiving system can be viewed as a DC combiner because each patch antenna has a separate rectifier circuit that can collect RF power and convert it to DC. All the DC contributions were summed to compare the RF to DC efficiency of the entire mm-Wave for the two flat-top configurations. After comparing the results at different distances between the transmitting array and the receiving system for the two configurations, it was found that configuration 1 produced better results in terms of RF-DC efficiency per patch element whereas, configuration 2D produced better overall results in terms of total rectified power by the receiving system because a large number of receiving antennas could be accumulated inside the area covered by the beam. The average RF-DC efficiency was almost constant for every receiving patch which was a consequence of constant received power which was achieved through the flat-top beam