Sidelobe Suppression Beamforming Using Tapered Amplitude Distribution for a Microwave Power Transfer System with a Planar Array Antenna

Abstract

This paper proposes a sidelobe suppression beamforming scheme using tapered amplitude distribution for microwave power transfer (MPT) with a two-dimensional planar array antenna (PAA). To overcome the undesirable effects of sidelobes, the magnitude of the sidelobes can be lowered by manipulating the amplitude distribution of the PAA. By analyzing the array factor of the PAA, we expressed the amplitude distribution as the product of two one-dimensional vectors. Moreover, we developed a method for obtaining these vectors from an expected sidelobe level (SLL). We used the Chebyshev taper, which has a higher directivity than other distributions given an expected SLL, for the amplitude distribution. To verify the proposed method, we designed and implemented a digital beamforming system with a 4 × 4 transmitter (Tx) array and a receiver (Rx) at 5.8 GHz. Compared with a uniform amplitude distribution, the proposed method reduced the SLL by 7.5 dB but the received RF power by only 0.6 dB. We compared the performance of the proposed MPT system with the results of previous studies.