Single layered swastika-shaped flexible linear-to-circular polarizer using textiles for S-band application

Abstract

A new swastika‐shaped single layered flexible linear‐to‐circular polarizer is proposed for Cube Satellite application in S‐band. The proposed linear‐to‐circular polarizer is designed fully using ShieldIt Super conductive textile on a lightweight felt substrate. Principle of operation is discussed comprehensively with an equivalent circuit model and its interaction with different orthogonal polarized wave components along with a succinct study of surface currents in different polarizations. Another linear‐to‐circular polarizer implemented on Polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) substrate is designed and compared with the textile‐based design. A preliminary deployment scheme is also proposed and studied by analyzing its performance under different bending conditions. Both textile and PDMS structures are confirmed to be operational within the range of 2.39 to 2.45 GHz. The textile polarizer is then prototyped and validated to be exhibiting similar conversion efficiency (CE) of 98% (simulated) and 93% (measured) at 2.45 GHz. Moreover, the fractional bandwidth defined by their 90% CE limits are 7.35% (from 2.36 to 2.55 GHz) in simulations and 6.6% (from 2.36 to 2.52 GHz) in measurements. The resulting axial ratio produced is 1.4 dB (in simulations) and 2 dB (in measurements), indicated its suitability for S‐band application.

Deployable Linear-to-Circular Polarizer Using PDMS Based on Unloaded and Loaded Circular FSS Arrays for Pico-Satellites

“…However, these designs are not flexible. On the other hand, the previous research utilizing flexible materials presented in [9] featured a limited BW 3dB bandwidth of 5.39 %.…”

“…To ensure reliability of communication, many types of high gain circularly polarized (CP) antenna topologies have been studied for its use, including conventional arrays and reflectarrays, reflector antennas, horns, multifeed and gain-enhanced microstrip antennas, etc [1]. However, these antennas require stringent design specifications, besides being conventionally implemented using rigid structures, which are difficult to integrate in CubeSats given their space constraint [9]. Moreover, due to the sizes of CubeSat (with the smallest of 1U size, equivalent to 10 × 10 × 10 cm 3 ), antennas in deployable formats is almost an essential need for CubeSats, as they communicate in the UHF and S-band, which results in electrically large antennas and polarizers.…”

“…A brief comparison of the reported polarizers is tabulated in Table 1. It can be seen that most of the polarizers are designed on rigid surfaces, except our previous works in [9] and [10]. The CP characteristics of polarizers are assessed using the bandwidth BW η conv with conversion efficiency η conv higher than 90% [19].…”

Design and fabrication of flexible FSS polarizer

“…Many polarization converters are reported in the literature. Performance of the polarizer depends on the geometry of the unit cell elements used to realize the FSS array . A single layer quarter wave plate circular polarizer made of dipole structure is illustrated in Reference .…”

“…Yet another multilayered polarization conversion FSS operating at K and Ka frequency bands is reported in Reference . A swastika shaped single layered flexible polarizer for cube satellite application is reported using ShieldIt super conducitve textile on a lightweight felt substrate . Also a linear‐to‐circular polarizer implemented on a PDMS substrate with ShieldIt super conductive textile for operation in the S‐band is found in the literature .…”