Reflectarray antennas: An intuitive explanation of reflection phase behavior

This paper presents the concept of reflectarray in a novel way, utilizing a graphical visualization tool. This approach greatly facilitates understanding of the working of the reflectarray antenna, and provides an intuitive explanation for the reflectarray behavior. The reflectarray element is characterized in a unit cell environment (periodic) and true reflectarray environment for its reflection phase performance. By understanding the reflection phase response of the element itself in these two environments, one can gain great insight into the reflectarray reflection phase phenomenon. By analyzing and evaluating the incident, scattered, and total fields, the element behavior can be studied in detail and the overall reflectarray performance can be validated. This reflection phase approach can also be potentially used to perform diagnostic tests on reflectarrays and identify existing flaws in the design and thus help in enhancing the design of reflectarray antenna.