Shaped Solid Contour Beam Reflector Antennas That Adjust to Varying Operating Conditions With Just a Few Mechanical Actuators

The aim of this work is to design a shaped solid reflector mechanically reconfigurable and capable to comply changeable coverage requirements using few actuators. The method directly optimizes the actuators with a heuristic technique based in ant colony algorithm, where both mechanical and electromagnetic models are integrated in the same cost function in a simple and effective way using the mechanical concept of stiffness matrix. To illustrate this technique, we present an example of a reconfigurable reflector antenna that covers South America with a minimum directivity and, for some reduction of this minimum directivity, is able to increase the directivity in selected regions to respond to rain and other changing conditions in a few seconds.