An Ultra-Wideband Metal-Only Dipole Reflectarray Antenna

摘要

This paper presents a new ultra-wideband metalonly dipole reflectarray (MODRA) antenna, designed to operate over the frequency range of 10-19 GHz. The proposed structure offers many advantages over the legacy design. For instance, its simplicity and lightweight enable us to develop a large-size reflectarray (RA) antenna, which can be deployed on any platform including a satellite. The proposed MODRA antenna consists of dipole antennas with varying lengths, which is mechanically supported by a rectangular metallic ring and a short-circuited metal strip. Stainless-steel metal has been suggested as the material to use to fabricate the proposed structure. Normal incident simulation shows that at 10 GHz the MODRA antenna realizes 339° phase range when the dipole lengths vary from 1mm to 14mm; furthermore, it realizes a 298° phase range at 19 GHz for the same dipole-length variation. The maximum reflection loss is found to be 0.51 dB and 0.2 dB at 10 GHz and 19 GHz, respectively. Finally, metal-only multi-dipole reflectarray (MOMDRA) antenna is employed as a simple solution to overcome the phase shift limitation of the MODRA antenna. Simulations show that reflection phases of 345° and 657° are realized at 10 GHz and 18 GHz, respectively.