Design of Folded Reflectarray Antennas Using Pancharatnam-Berry Phase Reflectors

In this paper, a folded reflectarray antenna (FRA) is developed using a crossed-dipole based reflector. By using the Pancharatnam–Berry phase theory, it is theoretically demonstrated that the crossed-dipole based reflector is capable of providing both 90° polarization conversion and the phase compensation for linearly polarized incident waves. Due to the negligible mutual interaction between the two orthogonally crossed dipoles, the reflection phases for the incident waves with polarizations along the two dipoles can be controlled independently, making the phase compensation and the polarization conversion convenient at the same time. To validate the FRA design, both simulations and experiments were conducted and good agreements are obtained. An FRA with a peak gain of 27.34 dBi and a 3-dB gain bandwidth of 13.2% is achieved.