Equivalent strip width for cylindrical wire for mesh reflector antennas: Experiments, waveguide, and plane-wave simulations

This paper presents the verification of the equivalent strip width for a cylindrical wire for mesh reflector antennas with experimental and numerical analysis and compares wave- guide and plane-wave simulations. For experimental purposes, the transmission and reflection characteristics of copper strips and copper wires were measured. For numerical analysis, a model of the experimental setup was designed and simulated in High-Frequency Structure Simulator (HFSS). Comparing the measurement and HFSS simulated results confirmed that the numerical model was accurate. Using HFSS, it was verified that the equivalent strip width for a cylindrical wire is almost twice (similar to 1.89) the wire diameter (for an infinitely thin strip) for typical mesh reflector structures. A periodic strip model was simulated both in HFSS and periodic Method of Moments (MoM) using the plane-wave incidence at different angles and the transmission and reflection characteristics were determined. The effects of the thickness of the strip, angle of incidence, and the spacing between the adjacent strips on the equivalence between the strip width and wire diameter were also studied. As the center to center strip spacing increases beyond 1.5 lambda, the equivalent factor beta (strip width /wire diameter) approaches the classical factor of 2.