Design and fabrication of a folding-and-rolling reflectarray antenna

Presents a new architecture of the reflectarray antenna, it is useful to reduce the weight and the volume of antenna when it is undeployed. A detailed method of computing the cable system was introduced. Found that the axial force on the aluminum laminate boom is relatively small when the spans of the reflector boundary is odd. The most fundamental structural component of this antenna is the spring tape reinforced aluminum laminate inflatable boom. The finite element solution is closely approximate to the experiment results, when accomplishing the nonlinear buckling analysis of the aluminum laminate boom with initial imperfection of 5%. At the end, this new type of folding-and-rolling reflectarray antenna was made; the surface precision of this antenna was measured. The result shows that this kind of new type antenna is suitable for application.