Modeling and simulating a metamaterial to enhance electromagnetic power transfer efficiency

Several microwave power transfer efficiency applications involve interfaces where more than half of the incident wave's power density is frequently reflected. To enhance this efficiency, various media for impedance matching between volumetric materials used in biomedical, industrial, and environmental remediation applications have been proposed. However, they either exhibit high losses or require a specialized manufacturing process. Given that the use of volumetric metamaterials as matching media is an underexplored area of research, the authors of this paper first propose, model, and simulate a metallic cubic conductor metamaterial to investigate its understudied parameters. Then, the metamaterial is simulated in a quarter-wavelenght impedance transformer configuration to improve the efficiency of electromagnetic wave power transfer at an air-water interface. Numerical simulations and analytical modeling of this configuration show that the power density of the transmitted wave more than doubles respect to the interface without the proposed matching system. This improvement is achieved since the metamaterial has an intrinsic impedance within the same range as that of the materials to be matched, since the metamaterial is a low loss, a positively polarizable and exhibits a mu-near zero behaviour. In contrast to other impedance matching media, the suggested metamaterial has a low attenuation constant, offers a wide range of intrinsic impedance values, and can be constructed with readily available materials.