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

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 reff 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 reff 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 reff 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 reff 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.