Deployable and Reconfigurable Miura-Ori Reflectarray for Mission-Flexible Satellite Applications

A Mechanically Rollable Reflectarray With Beam-Scanning Capabilities

“…3. In Step 1, the phase distribution of a N × M element RA is synthesized to radiate a main beam towards the broadside direction (ϕ = 0 • , θ = 0 • ) using the ray-tracing method [15]. Then, in Step 2, the RA elements are rolled laterally a distance d, which is equal to the width of one element column, to the first rolling position, i=1.…”

“…Next, in Step 3, the column of elements shifted out of the illumination window is eliminated to simulate it being rolled behind the ground plane and out of sight of the feed antenna. In Step 4, the radiation pattern of the remaining N × (M − 1) element array is calculated using array theory [15]. In Step 5, the direction of the main beam, (ϕ bi , θ bi ), from the radiation pattern calculated in Step 4 is found.…”

“…In this setup, the feed is assumed to be a point source positioned at the broadside direction at a distance f /A = 0.8, where f is the focal distance. The feed antenna pattern is defined by cos 2q (θ) [15], with a q-factor of 4.25. Four different aperture sizes are considered in our analysis: A = 10λ, 20λ, 30λ, and 40λ.…”

“…In total, 16 rollable RA apertures were synthesized. Then, the performance of each aperture is characterized by calculating the radiation pattern for each rolling position, i, analytically using array theory [15]. The results of our analytical study are shown in Fig.…”

“…This demonstrates that our optimization process can be applied to any design regardless of unit-cell size. Notably, for a fixed size aperture, the inter-element spacing of an RA is determined by the unit-cell size, and the amount of mutual coupling between the elements of an RA depends on its inter-element spacing [15], [57]- [60].…”