Preliminary Results on Convex Conformal Dielectric-based Reflectarrays

Abstract

In this paper, some numerical results on the possibility to design a 3D-printable dielectric ReflectArray (RA) antenna that can be conformed to a cylindrical surface are presented. The reflectarray is designed to be manufactured using a dielectric material characterized by a high relative dielectric constant: this choice drastically decreases the RA thickness, favouring its flexibility and therefore its possibility to be bent to a curved surface. Results on the numerical analysis of medium-size RAs conformal to cylinder with different radius show that the decrease of the antennas performance is kept down over a wide range of variation for the curvature radius, confirming their feasibility and their potentialities.