ZTE Communications ›› 2022, Vol. 20 ›› Issue (2): 37-42.doi: 10.12142/ZTECOM.202202006

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Polarization Reconfigurable Patch Antenna for Wireless Power Transfer Related Applications

SHEN Jun, ZHAO Tianxiang, LIU Xueguan()   

  1. Soochow University, Suzhou 215006, China
  • Received:2022-04-18 Online:2022-06-15 Published:2022-05-24
  • About author:SHEN Jun received the BE degree in electronic and communications engineering from Soochow University, China in 2001, and is currently working toward the PhD degree at Soochow University. He is currently a research and teaching assistant with Soochow University. After his undergraduate studies, he spent almost 20 years in the industry as an electronic and communications engineer with Mitec, Powerwave, and Kaelus, where he was involved with advanced filters for cellular radio.|ZHAO Tianxiang received his BS degree in communication engineering from the School of Electronic and Information Engineering, Soochow University, China in 2020. His BS thesis dealt with the design of a single-port double-throw RF switch based on PIN diodes. He has been pursuing his MS degree at Soochoow University since Sept. 2020. His research interest is UHF RFID technologies, especially RF switch matrix for bistatic RFID systems.|LIU Xueguan ( txdzlxg@suda.edu.cn) received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Xidian University, China in 1986 and 1989 respectively. He is a professor and doctoral supervisor of the School of Electronic Information, Soochow University, China. He is also the director of Suzhou Microwave Millimeter Wave High-tech Research Key Laboratory and the director of Soochow University Radio Frequency and Wireless Communication Institute. His research interests are electromagnetic theory, radio frequency and wireless applications, and antenna design and microwave automatic measurement technology.

Abstract:

A polarized reconfigurable patch antenna is proposed in this paper. The proposed antenna is a dual cross-polarized patch antenna with a programmable power divider. The programmable power divider consists of two branch line couplers (BLC) and a digital phase shifter. By adjusting the phase of the phase shifter, the power ratio of the power divider can be changed, and thus the feed power to the antenna input port can be changed to reconfigure the antenna polarization. The phase-controlled power divider and the cross dual-polarized antenna are designed, fabricated and tested, and then they are combined to realize the polarized reconfigurable antenna. By moving the phase of the phase shifter, the antenna polarization is reconfigured into vertical polarization (VP), horizontal polarization (HP), and circular polarization (CP). The test is conducted at the frequency of 915 MHz, which is widely used for simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) in radio-frequency identification (RFID) applications. The results demonstrate that when the antenna is configured as CP, the axial ratio of the antenna is less than 3 dB, and when the antenna is configured as HP or VP, the axial ratio of the antenna exceeds 20 dB. Finally, experiments are conducted to verify the influence of antenna polarization changes on wireless power transmitting. As expected, the reconfigured antenna polarization can help improve the power transmitting efficiency.

Key words: power transfer, branch line coupler, polarization reconfigurable, dual cross polarization antenna