Implementation of an Innovative Method to Design Reflectarray Antennas

A novel computed aided technique for designing reflectarray antennas is presented. The developed approach automatically generates the geometrical model of reflectarray antennas taking into account some input parameters, such as, the unit cell type and dimensions, frequency, focal length, periodicity, dielectric materials, and desired main beam radiating direction. The characteristics of the reflecting elements are selected considering the spatial phase delay at each unit cell to achieve a progressive phase shift. The implemented procedure also provides the phase characteristic of the unit element, which is rapidly computed by using a parallelized Moment Method (MoM) approach. The MoM is also used to obtain the radiation pattern of the full reflectarray antenna. In order to evaluate the new technique, a dual-interface prototype has been designed and simulated showing high-performance capability.