A Study on a Compact Double Layer Sub-GHz Reflectarray Design Suitable for Wireless Power Transfer

Abstract

The paper presents a novel small-footprint varactor diode-based reconfigurable reflectarray (RRA) design and investigates its power reflection efficiency theoretically and experimentally in a real-life indoor environment. The surface is designed to operate at 865.5 MHz and is intended for simultaneous use with other wireless power transfer (WPT) efficiency-improving techniques that have been recently reported in the literature. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, no RRA intended to improve the performance of antenna-based WPT systems operating in the sub-GHz range has been designed and studied both theoretically and experimentally so far. The proposed RRA is a two-layer structure. The top layer contains electronically tunable phase shifters for the local phase control of an incoming electromagnetic wave, while the other one is fully covered by metal to reduce the phase shifter size and RRA’s backscattering. Each phase shifter is a pair of diode-loaded 8-shaped metallic patches. Extensive numerical studies are conducted to ascertain a suitable set of RRA unit cell parameters that ensure both adequate phase agility and reflection uniformity for a given varactor parameter. The RRA design parameter finding procedure followed in this paper comprises several steps. First, the phase and amplitude responses of a virtual infinite double periodic RRA are computed using full-wave solver Ansys HFSS. Once the design parameters are found for a given set of physical constraints, the phase curve of the corresponding finite array is retrieved to estimate the side lobe level due to the finiteness of the RRA aperture. Then, a diode reactance combination is found for several different RRA reflection angles, and the corresponding RRA radiation pattern is computed. The numerical results show that the side lobe level and the deviation of the peak reflected power angles from the desired ones are more sensitive to the reflection coefficient magnitude uniformity than to the phase agility. Furthermore, it is found that for scanning angles less than 50°, satisfactory reflection efficiency can be achieved by using the classical reactance profile synthesis approach employing the generalized geometrical optics (GGO) approximation, which is in accord with the findings of other studies. Additionally, for large reflection angles, an alternative synthesis approach relying on the Floquet mode amplitude optimization is utilized to verify the maximum achievable efficiency of the proposed RRA at large angles. A prototype consisting of 36 elements is fabricated and measured to verify the proposed reflectarray design experimentally. The initial diode voltage combination is found by applying the GGO-based phase profile synthesis method to the experimentally obtained phase curve. Then, the voltage combination is optimized in real time based on power measurement. Finally, the radiation pattern of the prototype is acquired using a pair of identical 4-director printed Yagi antennas with a gain of 9.17 dBi and compared with the simulated. The calculated results are consistent with the measured ones. However, some discrepancies attributed to the adverse effects of biasing lines are observed.