On the design of clustered planar phased arrays for wireless power transmission

In the framework of wireless power transmission applications, the design of planar phased arrays providing maximum beam collection efficiency (i.e., maximizing the ratio between the power radiated over a target area and the total power transmitted by the array) through a sub-arrayed architecture is addressed. The degrees-of-freedom of the synthesis problem at hand (i.e., the membership of the array elements to clusters and the sub-array amplitudes) are determined by means of an excitation matching technique exploiting the knowledge of the set of independent and optimal weights providing maximum transfer efficiency. A set of representative results is reported to assess the reliability and effectiveness of the approach in yielding beam efficiency values close to the optimal ones with a limited number of sub-arrays.