Beam-Scanning Reflectarray Antennas: A technical overview and state of the art

Abstract

A u g u s t 2 0 1 5 1045-9243/15©2015IEEE detailed overview of various design methodologies and enabling technologies for beam-scanning reflectarray antennas is presented in this article. Numerous advantages of reflectarrays over reflectors and phased arrays are delineated, and representative beam-scanning reflectarray antenna designs are reviewed. For limited field-of-view beam-scanning systems, utilizing the reflector nature of the reflectarray antenna and the feed-tuning technique can provide a simple solution with good performance. On the other hand, for applications where wideangle scan coverage is required, utilizing the array nature of the reflectarray and the aperture phase-tuning approach are the more suitable choices. There are various enabling technologies available for both design methodologies, making them a suitable choice for the new generation of high-speed, high-gain beam-scanning antennas. Microstrip reflectarraysSince the revolutionary breakthrough of printed antenna technology, microstrip reflectarrays have emerged as a new generation of high-gain antennas, combining many favorable features of both reflectors and printed arrays as well as offering an alternative design with low-profile and low-mass features [1], [2]. The aperture of a reflectarray antenna consists of elements arranged in a certain grid that are designed

A Novel Time Reversal Based Microwave Imaging System

“…This results in the so-called reconfigurable reflectarray antennas, where one can exploit features such as beam steering. Recent reviews on tunable and beam-scanning reflectarray antennas can be found in [15,16].…”

Graphene-based Yagi-Uda antenna with reconfigurable radiation patterns

“…Fortunately, graphene can be introduced as the "switch" for terahertz-frequency devices because of its active complex conductivity. Some antennas take advantage of the graphene by making the frequency or the radiation pattern reconfigurable [17][18][19][20][21][22][23] such as the MIMO antennas, 17 leaky-wave antennas, 18,19 Yagi antennas, 20 microstrip quasi-Yagi antennas, 21 reflect-array antennas, 22 slot antennas, 23 and dipole antennas. 24,25 The antennas proposed in Refs.…”

Electronically Reconfigurable Reflective Phase Shifter for Circularly Polarized Reflectarray Systems

“…Reflectarray antennas have become a real alternative in transmission/reception systems whose requirements impose severe constraints in terms of radiation pattern, directivity or gain [3]. The underlying idea in reflectarrays is the substitution of the conventional conformed reflector: the reflective surface that transforms in a plane wave the wave coming from the feeder is replaced by a planar array of radiating elements with an adequate phase distribution at each array cell [3], [4]. The phase shifting strategy, which depends on the system topology and the final antenna specifications, is usually provided by either a reflective delay line circuit connected to each radiating cell or at the radiating element itself by varying the element size and shape [5].…”