Development of Beam Steerable Reflectarray With Liquid Crystal for Both E-Plane and H-Plane

Abstract

In this paper, a reconfigurable reflectarray (RA) with two-finger element composed of electrically biased liquid crystal (LC) at millimeter wave band is proposed. An orthogonal bias network is proposed and developed, which can result in changes in the equivalent relative permittivity of the liquid crystal, and reflection phase along direction $x$ and direction $y$ can be realized, thus beam steering at both E-plane and H-plane can be achieved. The LC RA is composed of 10 $\times $ 10 elements of 2-finger unit, a standard horn antenna is obliquely placed as feed, and radiation pattern is calculated by array synthesis and full wave simulation. It is found that beam scan at both E-plane and H-plane can be achieved. Compared with former researches of LC RA, this work introduces a simple scheme to achieve beam scan for LC RA at both E-plane and H-plane.

Keywords

• Reconfigurable
• reflectarray
• liquid crystal
• beam scan