Design and implementation of a hybrid rectenna array for microwave wireless power transmission applications

In this paper, a 2.45 GHz hybrid rectenna array (HRA) composed of three different-scale subarrays is efficiently and conveniently used to realize DC power pooling. To demonstrate this concept, a miniature microwave wireless power transmission (MWPT) system is built to verify the performance of the HRA at different incidence angles. Measurement results show that when the transmitter aligns with the center of the receiver (θ = 0°), the total DC output power of the uniform rectenna array (URA) and the HRA are very similar, with values of 236.138 and 248.218 mW, respectively. However, the latter has better performance in terms of voltage fluctuation, with an amplitude of only 0.4 V. This indicates that the proposed HRA can achieve DC power pooling more easily with a parallel connection network. Results show that the HRA achieves a total DC output power of 214.9 mW, representing a 57.5% improvement over the URA’s 136.4 mW. Moreover, when the transmitter’s incidence angle varies from −40° to 40°, the voltage fluctuation of the HRA is less than 0.5 V, while that of the URA is more than 2 V. All results demonstrate that the proposed HRA has a good prospect for DC power pooling in MWPT systems.