Design of a 4x4 Ultrawideb and Phased Array Antenna for Wireless Power Transfer Application

In this paper, a double L-slot modified microstrip patch element quadrant-based 4×4 phased array antenna is proposed for far-field wireless power transfer (WPT) application. The concept behind this research is to design a better steering-capable phased array antenna operating in the frequency range of 3.1 - 10.6 GHz for recharging unmanned micro aerial vehicles (MAVs). A 2.4 mm thick FR4 substrate material with a dielectric constant of 4.3 is used to design and simulate the proposed antenna. A 0.035 mm thick copper (Cu) layer is used for the patch and the ground layers, respectively. The proposed array antenna attains a maximum gain of 12.2 dBi, multiple BWs (bandwidths) of 0.42 GHz (4.18 - 4.60 GHz, fractional BW of 9.56%), 0.69 GHz (6.42 -7.11 GHz, fractional BW of 10.19%), and 1.67 GHz (8.93-10.60 GHz, 17.10%). The simulated radiation pattern shows a beam steering angle ranging from 13° to 99° along the phi (φ)- axis and -9° to -81° along the theta (θ)-axis for the input phase signal range of 0° to 337.5°, which is ~2x better in terms of the gain, size, and scanning angle compared to the other state-of-the-art works. The achieved performance proves that the proposed antenna array is a promising candidate for WPT systems for unmanned aerial system (UAS).