A broadband and high‐gain differentially fed suspended plate antenna integrated with solar cells

Abstract

This paper proposes a differentially fed suspended plate antenna (SPA) integrated with solar cells. A structure of hollow cylinders is used to support the patch and enhance the gain by suppressing any unwanted high-order mode. More importantly, the cathode of the solar cells is connected to the antenna ground to improve the compatibility of the antenna and solar cells without introducing additional filters. Differentially fed L-shaped coaxial probes feed the SPA to enhance the bandwidth. The anode and the cathode of the two solar cells are connected and located directly above the patch. A prototype of the solar cell SPA is fabricated and measured to verify the stability of its radiation and energy-harvesting performance. The measurement results show that the bandwidth of the proposed solar cell SPA is 3.2-5.1 GHz for wideband application, and its gain is higher than 9.51 dBi in the operating band.

A programmable solar‐powered radio frequency transmitter

“…Optical transparent antennas using mesh conductors as radiators 1,2 or using a transparent dielectric resonator 3 are used in combination with solar cells. In addition, using solar panels as radiation structures [4][5][6] or reflective ground 7 is also used for solar antenna design. However, for these passive solar antennas, how to supply the electric energy generated by the solar cell to the active antenna to transmit or receive a radio frequency (RF) signal is challenging.…”