THE NEW SCIENTIFIC SCENARIO OF POWER WIRELESS TRANSMISSION Giorgio Franceschetti, Universita Federico II, Napoli, Italy In our

scientific community wireless transmission automatically implies messages transfer from one site to another one, without any wire connection.. The actual stringent need of energy , possibly clean and renewable, has revived the old SPS (Solar Power Satellite) idea by P. Glaser (1968): in space, a solar energy collector to convert the solar energy into DC electricity, a DC-to-microwave converter, and a large array to beam down the microwave power; over the ground, a large rectenna (rectifying antenna) to convert the microwave power back to DC power, finally connected to existing electric power networks. This implies power wireless transmission, where the information content has no meaning. This wireless power transmission has been studied during the last 50 years, but the drive has always been the quoted application. However, power wireless transmission exhibits a wider scenario: the scientific features and implication of this new world are worth of an independent exploration. This special session within this Symposium has been organized in this spirit. Accordingly, only basic principles related to radiation and propagation of electromagnetic energy are in order. To remain with our feet over the ground, it is convenient to refer to basic parameters of a conventional SPS system: these are collected hereafter. Frequency: f = 2.45 or 5.80 GHz; RF transmitted power: PT = 1.4 GW ; Diameter of

the transmitting array: DT = 2 Km ; Required pointing accuracy: 0.0005 0 ; Number of its elements: hundreds of millions; Density power at the center of the rectenna over the ground: S = 300 W m 2 = 30 mW cm 2 ; Density power at its border:
S = 10 W m 2 = 1 mW cm 2 ; Diameter of the rectenna array: DR = 4 Km ; Number of its elements: hundreds of millions.

Even a superficial examination of above listed numbers suggests a large number of points worth to be explored, as optimal design of the huge transmitting array and similarly huge rectenna.. Just for example, the DC outputs from the array elements of the rectenna exhibit no phase, so that their summation does not require any synchronization: This implies that the rectenna can be located even in a hilly no-men landscape, and grating lobes can be highly reduced by a random distribution of the array elements. As additional innovative consideration, it is noted that the radiation pressure p = S c , c being the velocity of light, is associate to the radiated power. This suggests the use of the alternative frequency f = 94 GHz, that fells inside an atmospheric window, and is only attenuated by haze: but is should be examined if the radiation pressure of the high density power might sweep away the haze itself. On the same line, use of radiation pressure is a possible way to clean the debris filled orbit. Above consideration should convince that basic issues are worth to be explored. Additional considerations will be presented at the conference.