360 Degree Beam Steering for Wirelessly Charging Underground Proximity Sensors

In this paper, we propose a way of wirelessly recharging multiple proximity sensors dispersed underground for various applications including homeland security or private security. Due to the wide area of dispersion of sensors underground, the transmitter antenna must have high gain in all possible directions to cover an area without blind spots. An 8x8 patch array antenna is designed with Rogers RT Duroid 5880 substrate at 2.4 GHz. Six panels of these array antennas are combined into a hexagon shape for 360 degree beam steering, and is raised above the ground using a mount. The panels are tilted at 45 degrees and can be tilted forward and backward to change the coverage. The sidelobes of the array antenna are optimized using Dolph-Tschebyscheff distribution and binomial array. A hexagonal 3D structure is created using six panels of the array antenna. The simulation results show beam steering angles of 120 degrees for each panel with gain of 19.48 dBi at 0 degrees, and 17.66 dBi at both 60 and −60 degrees for Dolph-Tschebyscheff. Similar results were shown for the binomial array.