Phased array excitations for efficient near-field wireless power transmission

Abstract

This thesis is a continuation of an NPS project relating to the improvement of wireless-power transfer (WPT) in the near field. Improvement to power reception in the near field requires that excitation correction methods be applied to the transmitter antenna. The emphasis of this thesis is a parametric study of two correction methods to focus the transmitter array beam to the receiver array. Quadratic-phase correction and complex-conjugate matching methods were investigated using Matlab and Savant to implement a simulation. Array size, frequency of operation, and distance between arrays were parameters used to gauge the improvement of power reception. Both methods demonstrated improvement over the uniform case at certain distances in the near field, with the complex-conjugate matching method proving to be the better option at very close ranges. Analysis and discussions of the advantages and disadvantages of each method are presented.