Analysis On The Performance Of Mesh Reflector Antennas With Different Weaving Structures

Currently mesh reflector antennas are utilized onboard the spacecraft for satellite communications, remote sensing and VLBI applications. Knitted wire mesh is often used as reflecting surface of reflector antennas onboard the spacecraft because it is lightweight and demonstrates an elastic behavior due to its knitted structure, which allows improved packaging features during launch. It is very important to simulate the electric performance of mesh surface with different weaving structures because the mesh reflector is very expensive, difficult to construct and it will take a long time.The analysis models of induced current on a planar mesh and mesh reflector have been built. Several kinds of equivalent mesh models of rectangular, parallelogrammic, rhombic, triangular and hexagonal weaving structures have been built based on offset mesh reflectors, these models have the same single mesh area and mesh reflector area in order to compare with each other reasonably. Pyramidal horn antenna which can radiates linear polarization wave has been used as the feed of the offset mesh reflector, far field results of the mesh reflector have been obtained using the electromagnetic simulating software FEKO for calculating. The result has been obtained: transverse rhombic mesh structure has the best electric performance because it has the highest level in major lobe and the lowest level in side lobe. On the contrary, longitudinal rhombic mesh structure is the worst of the all because of its lowest level in major lobe and highest level in side lobe. The offset mesh reflector illuminated by another spiral antenna which radiates circular polarization wave has also been simulated by FEKO, it concludes that transverse rhombic mesh and square mesh structures are the comparatively best knitted structure because of their lowest cross-polarization level for almost the same co-polarization level and parallelogrammic and longitudinal rhombic mesh structures are the worst for their highest cross-polarization level.The difference found in directivity depending on the weaving structure of mesh surfaces indicates that it is important to choose proper mesh weaving structure to obtain acceptable performance for mesh reflector antennas. Attempts have been done for the building of equivalent models and simulations of mesh antennas in the paper, it can provide some basis for the choosing of appropriate weaving structures for mesh reflectors.