Reflectarray Antennas
There is a growing interest on reflectarray antennas for space telecom applications because of their low cost, low weight and easy deployment compared with parabolic reflectors or phased arrays. However, the cross-polarization requirements of direct broadcast applications cannot be met by reflectarray based on traditional unit elements such as square patches. In this activity we used a MATLAB-HFSS co-simulation to optimize the shape of the reflectarray elements allowing us to control not only the co-polar reflection coefficients but also the cross-polar ones. In this way, each cell can cause a slight depolarization of the reflected field that summed to the contributions of the other cells results in a quasi null cross-polarized radiated far field.
Joint magnitude and phase control of the cross-polar coefficients by truncating different corners of a square patch.
This activity has been funded by Thales Alenia Space France through Polar, Polar2 and Polar3 projects. For further information please contact Xavier Artiga (xavier.artiga@cttc.es).