High Aperture Efficiency Array Antenna for Wireless Power Transfer Applications

We propose a novel array antenna with high aperture efficiency by employing an array element operating in a high-order mode to improve the transmission efficiency of wireless power transmission applications. The proposed array element, operating at a frequency of 5.8 GHz, consists of a square patch with four metallic shorting pins, an extended cavity, and a high dielectric superstrate. The four metallic shorting pins derive the high-order operation, which can enhance the bore-sight gain, resulting in the high aperture efficiency of the array. The extended cavity structure can help further improvement the aperture efficiency and minimize the mutual coupling strength between adjacent elements. The proposed antenna element is extended to 2 × 2 and 4 × 4 arrays, resulting in aperture efficiencies of 74.2% and 80.5%, respectively. For the 2 × 2 array, maximum measured gains of 19.9 dBi in the zx-plane and 18.8 dBi in the zy-plane are observed. For the 4 × 4 array, the maximum measured gains of 24.3 dBi in the zx-plane and 24.5 dBi in the zy-plane are obtained in a full-anechoic chamber. Finally, the transmission efficiency of 6% with a distance of 0.8 m between the transmitter (Tx) and the receiver (Rx) is measured when setting up the wireless power transfer system, which consists of the Tx with the proposed 4 × 4 array and the Rx with a single element.