Research on magnetron phased array with mutual injection locking for space solar power satellite/station

Abstract

AbstractThe SPS (Space Solar Power Satellite/Station) will be a clean base‐load power station in space. It will be the largest space system ever built and will require a high‐efficiency, large‐size, highly accurate, lightweight, inexpensive phased array in order to transmit energy generated in space to the ground. We have proposed and developed a phase‐controlled magnetron (PCM) with injection locking and PLL technique for the high‐efficiency, lightweight, inexpensive phased array. It still has several weak points: (1) approximately 10% power loss occurs at the circulator for injection locking, (2) phase shifter is needed in each PCM for the phased array. In order to correct the weak points, we propose a magnetron phased array with mutual injection locking. For the magnetron phased array, we only use two PCMs with phase shifters; the other components are self‐oscillated and mutual injection locked magnetrons. In this paper, we propose a new formula for use with the magnetron phased array with mutual injection locking. We also present the results of experiments on beam direction control with the magnetron phased array with mutual injection locking. 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Electr Eng Jpn, 173(2): 21–32, 2010; Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI 10.1002/eej.20998