Single layered swastika-shaped flexible linear-to-circular polarizer using textiles for S-band application

A new swastika-shaped single layered flexible linear-to-circular polarizer is proposed for Cube Satellite application in S-band. The proposed linear-to-circular polarizer is designed fully using ShieldIt Super conductive textile on a lightweight felt substrate. Principle of operation is discussed comprehensively with an equivalent circuit model and its interaction with different orthogonal polarized wave components along with a succinct study of surface currents in different polarizations. Another linear-to-circular polarizer implemented on Polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) substrate is designed and compared with the textile-based design. A preliminary deployment scheme is also proposed and studied by analyzing its performance under different bending conditions. Both textile and PDMS structures are confirmed to be operational within the range of 2.39 to 2.45 GHz. The textile polarizer is then prototyped and validated to be exhibiting similar conversion efficiency (CE) of 98% (simulated) and 93% (measured) at 2.45 GHz. Moreover, the fractional bandwidth defined by their 90% CE limits are 7.35% (from 2.36 to 2.55 GHz) in simulations and 6.6% (from 2.36 to 2.52 GHz) in measurements. The resulting axial ratio produced is 1.4 dB (in simulations) and 2 dB (in measurements), indicated its suitability for S-band application.