We propose and implement a novel 1-bit coding metasurface that is capable of focusing and steering beam for enhancing power transfer efficiency of the electromagnetic (EM) wave-based wireless power transfer systems. The proposed metasurface comprises 16 × 16 unit cells which are designed with a fractal structure and the operating frequency of 5.8 GHz. One PIN diode is incorporated within each unit cell and enables two states with 180 ° phase change of the reflected signal at the unit cell. The two states of the unit cell correspond to the ON and OFF states of the PIN diode or “0” and “1” coding in the metasurface. By appropriately handling the ON/OFF states of the coding metasurface, we can control the reflected EM wave impinged on the metasurface. To verify the working ability of the coding metasurface, a prototype metasurface with a control board has been fabricated and measured. The results showed that the coding metasurface is capable of focusing beam to desired direction. For practical scenarios, we propose an adaptive optimal phase control scheme for focusing the beam to a mobile target. Furthermore, we prove that the proposed adaptive optimal phase control scheme outperforms the random phase control and beam synthesis schemes.
In this paper, we present a 5.8 GHz radio-frequency (RF) wireless power transfer (WPT) system that consists of 64 transmit antennas and 16 receive antennas. Unlike the inductive or resonant coupling-based near-field WPT, RF WPT has a great advantage in powering low-power internet of things (IoT) devices with its capability of long-range wireless power transfer. We also propose a beam scanning algorithm that can effectively transfer the power no matter whether the receiver is located in the radiative near-field zone or far-field zone. The proposed beam scanning algorithm is verified with a real-life WPT testbed implemented by ourselves. By experiments, we confirm that the implemented 5.8 GHz RF WPT system is able to transfer 3.67 mW at a distance of 25 meters with the proposed beam scanning algorithm. Moreover, with the proposed beam scanning algorithm, the power transfer efficiency reaches 20.32 % and 0.24 % at distances of 0.5 and 5 meters, respectively, whereas the far-field-only-scanning scheme achieved the transfer efficiencies of 13.45 % and 0.23 % at the same receiver positions. Since the proposed transmit antenna array has the maximum linear dimension of 299.12 mm, the approximate boundary between far-field and radiative near-field is 3.45 meters based on the Fraunhofer distance calculation. The results show that the proposed algorithm can effectively cover radiative near-field region differently from the conventional scanning schemes which are designed under the assumption of the far-field WPT.INDEX TERMS RF wireless power transfer, microwave power transfer, beam scanning, phased array antenna, rectifier.
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