Fully 3D-Printed Wideband Metasurface Folded Reflectarray Antenna

TL;DR

This paper introduces a fully 3D-printed wideband metasurface foldable reflectarray antenna operating in millimeter-wave frequencies, demonstrating high gain, wide bandwidth, and low-cost rapid prototyping for advanced wireless applications.

Contribution

It presents a novel 3D-printed metasurface design with volumetric dielectric control, enabling wideband performance and robust phase compensation, unlike traditional planar PCB-based reflectarrays.

Findings

Achieved 20.7% impedance bandwidth (26-32 GHz)

Realized peak gain of 31.1 dBi at 28.2 GHz

Maintained stable pencil beams with 3.7° HPBW

Abstract

This article presents a fully 3D-printed wideband metasurface folded reflectarray antenna (MFRA) operating in the millimeter-wave n257 band. The proposed MFRA integrates a novel polarization-rotating reflective metasurface (RMS), a compact embedded horn feed, and a polarization-selective metasurface polarization grid (MPG), all fabricated using a low-cost in-house 3D-printed method. Unlike conventional PCB-based FRAs constrained to planar unit-cell geometries, the proposed anisotropic meta-element design exploits full three-dimensional dielectric control by tailoring varying unit-cell heights. This volumetric tuning, combined with the spatial distribution of the meta-elements, enables phase compensation exceeding $400^{\circ}$ across the aperture, supporting robust wideband performance. An MFRA prototype is in-house fabricated and experimentally validated. Measured results agree well with simulations, achieving a $-10$ dB impedance bandwidth of 20.7\% (26--32 GHz) and a peak realized gain of 31.1 dBi at 28.2 GHz. The antenna exhibits sidelobe levels below $-20$ dB, cross-polarization below $-30$ dB, and a compact height-to-diameter ratio of 0.20. Stable pencil beams with an average HPBW of $3.7^{\circ}$ are maintained across the operating band. To further validate the robustness of the proposed in-house designed MFRA, a commercially manufactured RMS was also obtained, whose measured performance shows excellent agreement with the in-house 3D-printed version, confirming a cost-effective rapid-prototyping antenna solution. The proposed MFRA is a cost-effective solution for beyond 5G and 6G high-gain point-to-point mmWave wireless applications, such as fixed wireless access, near field communication, and beam focusing.