An Origami-Inspired Foldable Reflectarray on a Straight-Major Square-Twist Pattern

Abstract

This paper proposes a high-gain Reflectarray Antenna (RA) design on an origami-inspired foldable structure, which is based on the straight-major square-twist pattern (SMST). The antenna was designed to operate at 16 GHz and direct its main beam along φ = 00, 8 = 300 direction with a gain of 28.34 dBi. The RA was excited by a horn antenna of 14 dBi gain with Q-factor of 5.25 positioned at a distance of 10λ with a 10° offset angle. The foldable nature of our origami-inspired structure provides a 92% packing efficiency of the RA aperture surface area, thereby offering a significant advantage for small satellites and terrestrial tactical applications.