Design of Clustered Planar Arrays for Microwave Wireless Power Transmission

The design of microwave wireless power transmission systems sometimes requires the synthesis of large phased arrays, and the objective is to obtain the maximum beam collection efficiency (BCE). To reduce the feeding network complexity as well as system costs, subarray partition is usually indispensable, which is especially essential for large arrays in the context of long-range and high-power transmission applications. Through minimizing the difference between the subarrayed BCE and the reference one, the subarray partition problem can be reduced to an excitation matching one. Toward this end, a clustering method named k-means algorithm is adopted to determine the optimal subarray configuration. To assess the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed method, representative examples on different sizes and shapes of transmitting arrays and receiving regions are presented. Moreover, comparisons with the state-of-the-art technique are reported as well.