Abstract
Cylindrical parabolic reflectors have been widely used in those applications requiring high gain antennas. Their design is dictated by the geometric relation of the parabola, which relate the feed location, f, to the radiating aperture, D. In this work, the use of reflectarrays is proposed to increase D without changing the feed location. In the proposed approach, the reflecting surface is loaded with dielectric panels where the phase of the reflected field is controlled using continuous metal strips of variable widths. This solution is enabled by the cylindrical symmetry and, with respect to rectangular patches or to other discrete antennas, it provides increased gain. The proposed concept has been evaluated by designing a Ka-band antenna operating in the Rx SatCom band (19–21 GHz). A prototype has been designed and the results compared with the ones of a parabolic cylindrical reflector using the same feed architecture. Simulated results have shown how this type of antenna can provide higher gain in comparison to the parabolic counterpart, reaching a radiation efficiency of 65%.
Highlights
Reflectarray antennas have been among the most popular research topics of the last decades.The motivations behind this great diffusion are due to the great flexibility of this type of structure that can be designed to meet manifold requirements [1]
The direct integration of the feed with the block up-converter (BUC) and with the low noise block converter (LNB), which are typically too bulky to be incorporated with the reflectarray feed, is of great importance
This paper introduces a novel paneled reflectarray configuration that is derived from a parabolic cylindrical reflector
Summary
Reflectarray antennas have been among the most popular research topics of the last decades The motivations behind this great diffusion are due to the great flexibility of this type of structure that can be designed to meet manifold requirements [1]. In space applications the development of inflatable [3] or deployable [4] reflectarrays was widely studied to obtain large reflecting surfaces that can be stowed in a small volume during the launch phase. In these cases, the reflecting surface extends outside the satellite main body while the feed is integrated on the spacecraft. This configuration employs a Electronics 2019, 8, 654; doi:10.3390/electronics8060654 www.mdpi.com/journal/electronics
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