Optimizing Circular Arrays with Concentric Subarray Rings for Wireless Power Transmission Applications

The emerging wireless power transmission technology creates new opportunities in numerous real-world applications such as wireless charging systems, robots, and aerospace solutions. This paper introduces an optimized method for designing transmit antenna arrays which may be used for long-distance wireless power transmission with narrow focusing of RF power on remote receivers. The novelty of this paper consists in using an effective clustered subarray rings configuration with a transmit circular array instead of its conventional full aperture array, based on the configuration of individual elements. The final goal is to obtain simpler, cheaper, and lighter arrays. Amplitude and phase excitation weighting as well as the number of elements in each clustered subarray are optimized jointly to maximize the efficiency of transferring power to a target region while minimizing sidelobe powers outside the intended region. The simulation results show that the beam collection efficiency of the proposed system with 21 subarray rings was 98.99%, while that of the conventional circular array with individual dense elements of size 21×21 equaled 99.68%.