Optimized Wire Grid Modeling Method for Complex Metal Mesh Fabrics Using Waveguide-Contact Measurement.

Abstract

Metal mesh reflective surfaces are widely used in deployable antennas mounted on satellites where lightweight and stowability are required; however, quantitative characterization of reflective performance is difficult due to complex woven/knitted structures. This paper presents a modeling method that characterizes the reflection coefficient of complex mesh fabrics by combining a per-band effective wire radius <i>r_eff</i> estimation procedure with the Casey surface impedance model. The lattice spacing is fixed from the specimen geometry, the electrical conductivity is set to the material property of gold (σ = 45.2 MS/m), and <i>r_eff</i> is determined as a single parameter that minimizes the error against the measured reflection coefficient in each frequency band. For validation, waveguide-contact measurements were performed on three Atlas-series mesh specimens fabricated with gold-coated molybdenum wire (diameter: 30 μm), measuring each specimen across all three waveguide standards (WR-340, WR-90, WR-28) with nine repeated trials per configuration, totaling 162 measurement runs. The estimated <i>r_eff</i> ranged from 10.1 to 44.5 μm depending on band and polarization, with RMSE below 0.021 dB in all native-band fits. Even for the same specimen, directional <i>r_eff</i> values differed by up to 1.78× due to the anisotropy of the weave structure, confirming that polarization dependence must be considered in mesh reflector antenna design.