Description
A request for initiation has been received for this Priority 2 activity.
Objective:
To study and develop a Reflectarray antenna able to provide improved RF performance as compared to complex shaped reflector antennas while offering advantages in terms of cost, accommodation, versatility, and ability to define the coverage late in the development plan.
Targeted improvements:
20-40% expected saving in the overall antenna cost (including design, manufacturing & testing). Description: Reflectarray Antennas represent a promising antenna concept with respect to traditional reflector antennas for telecom missions. Despite several advantages (flat antennas, easy deployment and stowing, etc.) they still exhibit some limited performances in terms of: frequency bandwidth, sidelobe level, cross-polarization level, and ohmic losses.
Description:
Traditional ways of improving reflectarray antennas consist in identifying suitable elementary cells and dielectric materials. This has been done in recent ARTES 5.1 activities yielding promising results. An alternative way to improve reflectarray antennas, to be considered in this activity, consists in realizing the reflectarray on a curved surface or on a set of non-co-planar flat panels.
The introduction of curvature provides additional degrees of freedom for enhancing the reflect arrays performances.
Recent studies have clearly demonstrated that antennas based on a single curved reflect array or a reflectarray in flat panels may offer advantages in terms of cost, performance, deployment and stowing. For example when compared to highly shaped reflectors, reflect array antennas, build from a single flat panel, allow improved control of the cross-polarisation.
The activity shall be organised in the following tasks:
a) identification of a suitable target mission;
b) preliminary design of an antenna based on multi flat or curved reflectarray facets;
c) detailed design;
d) design, manufacturing and test of a breadboard representative of the main antenna functionalities.
Tender Specifics