Metasurface-Assisted Broadband Circularly Polarized Folded Reflectarray Antenna

In this article, a novel design of broadband circularly polarized (CP) folded reflectarray (FRA) antenna is proposed. The CP FRA consists of two kinds of metasurfaces (MSs) and a linearly polarized (LP) open waveguide antenna as the feeding source. The bottom MS functions as the main reflector, which is capable of realizing cross-polarization conversion and beam focusing simultaneously. The upper MS is utilized as a subreflector, which could reflect LP wave coming from the feeding source and transmit its orthogonal counterpart into CP wave. For demonstration, the MS-assisted CP FRA antenna is fabricated and measured. Numerical results are consistent with experimental ones, illustrating a peak gain of 24.1 dBi and a peak aperture efficiency of 51% at 9.9 GHz. The 3 dB gain bandwidth and 3 dB axial ratio (AR) bandwidth are achieved as 27.5% (8.8–11.6 GHz) and 43.9% (8–12.5 GHz), respectively. The proposed CP FRA provides a new avenue to realize broadband high-efficiency CP antenna, which may find great potentials in modern wireless communication systems.