Dynamic Beam Shaping Using a Dual-Band Metasurface-Inspired Electronically Tunable Reflectarray Antenna

TL;DR

This paper introduces a dual-band reconfigurable reflectarray antenna with a tunable unit cell, enabling broad beam steering in F and S bands, using a metasurface-inspired design and equivalent circuit modeling.

Contribution

It presents a novel dual-band reflectarray with a high phase tuning range, combining full-wave and circuit analysis for design, and demonstrates broad beam steering capabilities.

Findings

Achieved a phase range of 335° in F band and 340° in S band.

Demonstrated a beam steering range of up to ±60° in both bands.

Validated the design through fabrication and experimental testing.

Abstract

An electronically reconfigurable dual-band-reflectarray antenna is presented in this paper. The tunable unit cell, a ring loaded square patch with a single varactor diode connected across the gap between the ring and the patch, is modeled using both a full-wave solver and an equivalent circuit. The parameters of the equivalent circuit are calculated independently of the simulation and experiment using analysis techniques employed in frequency selective surfaces. The reflection phase of the proposed unit cell is shown to provide an excellent phase range of 335$^{\circ}$ in F band and 340$^{\circ}$ in S band. Results from the analysis are used to design and build a 10x10 element reflectarray antenna. The high tuning phase range of each element allows the fabricated reflectarray to demonstrate a very broad steering range of up to $\pm$60$^{\circ}$ in both frequency bands.