Description
This activity includes the development of effective analysis and design techniques for reflectarray antennas, the design and test of a breadboard, in order to demonstrate the benefits of advanced passive reflectarrays for Transmit and Receive satellite antennas in Ku band. Some improvements in both the reflectarray cells and design procedures have been implemented to achieve stringent requirements. New multi-resonant reflectarray cells have been proposed to improve the reflectarray performance in terms of gain, ohmic losses, bandwidth and cross-polarisation, and to reduce the number of layers, in order to simplify the manufacturing processes and to reduce the cost of the antenna. A Software tool has been implemented and validated to design and analyse the proposed reflectarray antennas. A 1.1 m reflectarray breadboard has been designed, manufactured and tested to fulfil the requirements of a South American coverage in Tx and Rx. The performance of this antenna has been compared with the performance of two reference antennas: a 1.2 m reflectarray made of 3 layers of stacked patches and a 1.1 m conventional reflector, showing that the new breadboard performs slightly better than both reference antennas.
The reflectarray breadboard has fully demonstrated the viability of this technology with very promising capabilities for Ku-Band TX/RX antennas.
