A confocal reflector for a reflectarray-based scanning system

In this work, an electronically scanned reflectarray is combined with a reflector system based on a Confocal configuration in order to obtain a pencil beam steering. A ray tracing technique is used to specify the reflectarray optimal position and size. The main novelty of this research is that the phase shift in the reflectarray elements is calculated in such a way that allows for both beam steering and compensation of the residual phase aberration at the same time. The antenna behavior is evaluated using ray tracing to analyze the phase aberrations in the system and Physical Optics to predict the antenna pattern. A set of representative simulation results showing the good scanning performance of the proposed system are presented.