A Metasurface Approach to Mitigate Misalignment Challenges in Wireless Power Transfer Systems

Misalignment poses a persistent challenge in conventional wireless power transfer systems, adversely affecting the efficiency and robustness. We propose a metasurface aided wireless power transfer system designed to address misalignment issues. This is a threefold process: first, we optimize the transmitter and receiver design to maximize mutual coupling; second, we analyze system behaviour under misalignment; third, we design a lens-like metasurface to restore the coupling in the presence of misalignment. We demonstrate a specific example in which the power transfer efficiency increases by roughly 47% with the introduction of a metasurface between the transmitter and receiver. We propose an optimization approach to calculate optimal parameters of the transmitter, the receiver, and the metasurface.