Design of a Contoured-Beam Reflectarray for a EuTELSAT European Coverage Using a Stacked-Patch Element Characterized by an Artificial Neural Network

The design of a reflectarray for satellite applications is accomplished in this letter. The use of full-wave electromagnetic methods to compute the reflectarray elements in the design process has been replaced by the characterization of the reflectarray elements by artificial neural networks (ANNs). The antenna is designed to provide coverage in Ku-band to a European region defined by EuTELSAT. The results obtained using ANN in the design are compared to those obtained from the method of moments (MoM), and a good agreement is achieved. The speedup factor between reflectarray optimization by both the ANN and the MoM is in the order of 10². Hence, the use of ANN is presented here as a promising fast technique in the design of reflectarrays.