Workshop 2

Reflectarray Antennas: Theory, Designs, and Applications

Abstract

In the recent years, reflectarrays have emerged as a new generation of high-gain antennas, which have attracted an increasing interest in the antenna community because of their low-profile, low-mass, and low-cost features. The reflectarray antenna is a hybrid design that combines many favorable features of reflectors and printed arrays. The aim of this short course is to present a comprehensive overview of reflectarray system design and state-of-the-art technology. This short course will enable attendees to understand the basics of reflectarray systems, become familiar with reflectarray design, analysis techniques, and enabling technologies, and apply this knowledge to designing reflectarrays for various applications.

The proposed curriculum for this course consists of two parts. In the first part, the history of reflectarray antenna development is first reviewed and then basic theories for analysis and design of reflectarray antennas are presented in detail. This section of the course builds the fundamental knowledge one needs to have in order to understand the governing dynamics of a reflectarray antenna system, and efficiently design and analyze reflectarray antennas. The second part of the course is intended for researchers that have a good knowledge of the basic theories in reflectarray, and aim at designing reflectarray antennas for specific applications. This part starts with a discussion on bandwidth limitation and solutions for broadband designs, and afterwards several advanced application oriented topics in reflectarray antennas will be presented.

About the speaker

Fan Yang received the B.S. and M.S. degrees from Tsinghua University, Beijing, China, and the Ph.D. degree from the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA).

From 2002 to 2004, he was a Post-Doctoral Research Engineer and Instructor with the Electrical Engineering Department, UCLA. In 2004, he joined the Electrical Engineering Department, The University of Mississippi as an Assistant Professor, and was promoted to an Associate Professor. In 2011, he joined the Electronic Engineering Department, Tsinghua University as a Professor, and has served as the Director of the Microwave and Antenna Institute since then.

Dr. Yang’s research interests include antennas, periodic structures, computational electromagnetics, and applied electromagnetic systems. He has published over 200 journal articles and conference papers, five book chapters, and three books entitled Scattering Analysis of Periodic Structures Using Finite-Difference Time-Domain Method (Morgan & Claypool, 2012), Electromagnetic Band Gap Structures in Antenna Engineering (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2009), and Electromagnetics and Antenna Optimization Using Taguchi’s Method (Morgan & Claypool, 2007).

Dr. Yang served as an Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Antennas and Propagation (2010-2013) and an Associate Editor-in-Chief of Applied Computational Electromagnetics Society (ACES) Journal (2008-2014). He was the Technical Program Committee (TPC) Chair of 2014 IEEE International Symposium on Antennas and Propagation and USNC-URSI Radio Science Meeting. Dr. Yang has been the recipient of several prestigious awards and recognitions, including the Young Scientist Award of the 2005 URSI General Assembly and the 2007 International Symposium on Electromagnetic Theory, the 2008 Junior Faculty Research Award of the University of Mississippi, the 2009 inaugural IEEE Donald G. Dudley Jr. Undergraduate Teaching Award, and the 2011 Recipient of Global Experts Program of China.