Non-Radiating Sources: A New Powerful Recipe for Designing Reflectarray Antennas

Innovative concepts and strategies for the design of reflectarray antennas are discussed in this work. More in detail, the synthesis of the antenna surface currents is addressed from an unconventional point-of-view, exploiting the inverse scattering (IS) theory and the non-uniqueness of the solution dictated by the existence of non-radiating (NR) current contributions. Thanks to such an approach, the designer is given the capability of imposing specific constraints on the geometry and implementation of the synthesized layout without any compromise on the desired far-field radiation features. An illustrative result is shown to provide the reader with an example of the effectiveness and potentialities of such a novel design framework.