Design of a transparent reflectarray integrated with solar cells using quad-key element

A transparent reflectarray integrated with solar cells using quad-key element is presented. The quad-key element is modified based on the meshed patch element in order to reduce the covering area and increase optical transparency. The reflection phase curve is smooth and phase range can attain 370° by varying the side length of the element. Using the good element performance, a reflectarray with square aperture of 149.1 mm is designed and simulated. The simulated gain of 24.6 dB and 1-dB gain bandwidth of 12.5% are achieved at center frequency of 13.58 GHz. Besides, the calculated optical transparency of the reflectarray is 85.1%, which shows good potential to integrate with solar cells.