IEEE AP-S Young Professional Ambassador Talk: Radiative Wireless Power Transfer with Microwave and mm-Wave: Is There Anything Concretely Possible With This Technology?

In this lecture, the fundamental concepts of WPT will be introduced by analyzing all components of a conventional WPT system. After that, the talk will focus on the air link radiative WPT section and will discuss the theoretical power transfer efficiency of two antenna apertures and its dependency on the working frequency, for both narrowband and wideband transmitting signals. The design and optimization of high efficiency discrete apertures will be then described based on microwave network theory. This analysis framework will also be extended to the complete radiative WPT system design, highlighting that the non-linearity of power source and rectification components requires to consider the whole radiative WPT system optimization and not only the single component efficiency maximization. Finally the applicability of the radiative WPT technology will be discussed, with particular emphasis on microwave space-based solar power stations and millimeter-wave frequencies regime.