Linear-Polarization-Insensitive Rectenna Design for Ground-to-Air Microwave Power Transmission

This paper presents a linear-polarization-insensitive rectenna for the ground-to-air microwave power transmission (MPT). With an integration of a hybrid coupler and a dual-linearly-polarized (DLP) antenna, a linearly-polarized (LP) incident wave can be decomposed by the antenna polarization tilts into the horizontally-polarized (HP) and the vertically-polarized (VP) components, correspondingly, which are then distributed evenly through the hybrid coupler as the inputs of two successive lumped rectifiers. Thus, RF-to-dc power conversion efficiencies (PCEs) of the presented DLP rectenna maintain insensitive to its incident LP polarization tilts. An aperture-coupled feeding mechanism and lumped matching networks are employed to enable the compact DLP rectenna design for practicality. Both theoretical analysis and experimental results validate that the RF-to-dc PCEs of the DLP rectenna keeps stable high regardless of its LP polarization tilts, which demonstrates a prospect for the ground-to-air MPT applications.