With the recent advancement and progress in the field of wireless power transfer (WPT), there is an ever increasing demand for high power transfer efficiency (PTE) of the WPT systems and improved transfer distance for the end-users. However, some existing WPT systems have limited PTE and transfer distance as they take the inductive coupling approach, where the PTE dramatically decreases as the distance between (Tx) and receiver (Rx) coils increases. Alternatively, magnetic resonance coupling (MRC) is used as a mid-range WPT approach, for which the insertion of metamaterials (MTMs) between Tx and Rx coils is exploited to improve efficiency. MTMs are artificially engineered materials that show uncommon electromagnetic properties, such as evanescent wave amplification and negative refractive characteristics, which could be utilized for the enhancement of PTE. In this paper, a comprehensive review on recent progresses in the MTM-based WPT systems is reported, where previously reported MTM-based WPT systems are compared in terms of various parameters such as configurations, operating frequencies, dimensions and PTE. Also, the PTEs of these systems were plotted as a function of the normalized transfer distance. This review is expected to provide an insight for understanding the trends of the MTM-based WPT systems and serve as a reference for researchers who work on WPT systems and their applications. INDEX TERMS Wireless power transfer (WPT), metamaterials (MTMs), power transfer efficiency (PTE), energy harvesting

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This paper presents a metamaterial (MTM)-integrated high-gain rectenna for RF sensing and energy harvesting applications that operates at 2.45 GHz, an industry, science, medicine (ISM) band. The novel MTM superstrate approach with a three-layered integration method is firstly introduced for rectenna applications. The integrated rectenna consists of three layers, where the first layer is an MTM superstrate consisting of four-by-four MTM unit cell arrays, the second layer a patch antenna, and the third layer a rectifier circuit. By integrating the MTM superstrate on top of the patch antenna, the gain of the antenna is enhanced, owing to its beam focusing capability of the MTM superstrate. This induces the increase of the captured RF power at the rectifier input, resulting in high-output DC power and high entire end-to-end efficiency. A parametric analysis is performed in order to optimize the near-zero property of the MTM unit cell. In addition, the effects of the number of MTM unit cells on the performance of the integrated rectenna are studied. A prototype MTM-integrated rectenna, which is designed on an RO5880 substrate, is fabricated and characterized. The measured gain of the MTM-integrated rectenna is 11.87 dB. It shows a gain improvement of 6.12 dB compared to a counterpart patch antenna without an MTM superstrate and a maximum RF–DC conversion efficiency of 78.9% at an input RF power of 9 dBm. This results in the improvement of the RF–DC efficiency from 39.2% to 78.9% and the increase of the output DC power from 0.7 mW to 6.27 mW (a factor of 8.96 improvements). The demonstrated MTM-integrated rectenna has shown outstanding performance compared to other previously reported work. We emphasize that the demonstrated MTM-integrated rectenna has a low design complexity compared with other work, as the MTM superstrate layer is integrated on top of the simple patch antenna and rectifier circuit. In addition, the number of MTM units can be determined depending on applications. It is highly envisioned that the demonstrated MTM-integrated rectenna will provide new possibilities for practical energy harvesting applications with improved antenna gain and efficiency in various IoT environments.

This paper presents a rollable metamaterial screen for high-efficiency wireless power transfer (WPT) system based on magnetic resonance coupling, which operates at 4.5 MHz. The rollable metamaterial screen with a fully expanded area of 750 mm × 750 mm is located in the middle between transmitter and receiver coils and focuses the magnetic field and, by such a way, significantly improves power transfer efficiency (PTE). The metamaterial screen can be rolled up, e.g. onto the ceiling when it is not used, and thus does not require any designated space for the screen saving space. A WPT system with the rollable metamaterial screen is designed, fabricated, and characterized. Improved PTE is qualitatively and quantitatively verified by light bulb experiments and vector network analyzer measurements. The PTE of the WPT system with the metamaterial screen increases from 36 to 58.52% and 10.24 to 31.36% for the distances between the transmitter and receiver coils 100 and 150 cm, respectively. The effects of lateral and angular misalignments on the PTE of the WPT system are also studied. Obtained results show that the rollable metamaterial screen improves the PTE even at the misaligned condition.

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