Design and Simulation of UWB Phased Array Antenna For Wireless Power Transfer to Micro Aerial Vehicle (MAV) Through Beam Steering

Abstract

Microwave beam radiation-based far-field Wireless power transfer (WPT) provides power at a higher distance with a smaller attenuation. This can be used to power unmanned micro aerial vehicles (MAVs) thus not requiring them to come to the ground for recharging. Such WPT systems require antenna arrays with a high gain and a unidirectional beam for the most efficient power transfer. In this paper, a 4×4 phased array antenna design is proposed where it is divided into four quadrants of 2×2 array antennas and the total dimension is 17×14.3 cm2. The antenna is modeled on a 1.53 mm thick FR4 substrate with 0.035 mm thick Copper (Cu) for the patch and ground. Every single antenna is individually fed where the antennas in each quadrant are fed the same phased signal. By controlling the input signal phase of each quadrant, the radiation beam can be steered within −140° to +60° along the phi (ϕ) axis. The overall beam steering angle is 200° with a beam angle of 43°. The antenna also operates within the UWB frequency range of 7.6−8.75 GHz making it suitable for pulsed-based WPT system. The proposed phased array antenna achieves a high gain of 34 dBi, which is ∼2x higher compared to the other state-of-the-art works while achieving a 1.15 GHz of bandwidth.