A Design Methodology for Reconfigurable Reflectarrays with a Deformable Ground

This article presents a new reconfigurable reflectarray concept involving mechanical actuators that modify the shape of an RF conductive flexible ground plane. The distance between the ground plane and the cells is used to control their reflected phase. A dedicated design methodology is proposed to optimize the performance while minimizing the number of actuators. As a first illustration, a 1D panel providing three different shaped beams with only four actuators is studied. Full-wave simulations with HFSS are used for validation.