Design of Circularly Polarized Reflectarray in X-Band for Space Application in South America

In this paper, a circularly polarized reflectarray operating at 8.2 GHz is proposed. The desired phase distribution across the aperture is achieved using three parallel printed dipoles of varying dimensions, along with an additional pair of different dipoles placed at each corner of the unit cell. To ensure high polarization purity, all dipoles are symmetrically arranged around the central dipole. The primary feed system consists of a 2 × 2 circularly polarized microstrip antenna array, composed of four probe-fed quasi-rectangular microstrip antennas, sequentially rotated to provide effective cross-polarization decoupling. To characterize the phase response of the unit cell, the Floquet mode analysis technique was employed, with simulations conducted using Ansys HFSS. The reflectarray dimensions were designed to fit within the constraints of an 8U nano-satellite. Given this limitation, the scattering structure consists of a 12 × 12 elements, determined by the size of each unit cell.