Design and development of an electrically-controlled beam steering mirror for microwave tomography

Microwave tomography has gained significant attention due to its reliability and unhazardous nature in the fields of NDE and medical industry. A new microwave tomography system is presented in this paper, which significantly reduces the design and operational complexities of traditional microwave imaging systems. The major component of the proposed system is a reconfigurable reflectarray antenna which is used for beam steering in order to generate projections from multiple angles. The design, modeling and fabrication of the building block of the antenna, a tunable unit cell, are discussed in this paper. The unit cell is capable of dynamically altering the phase of the reflected field which results in beam steering ability of the reflectarray antenna. A tomographically reconstructed image of a dielectric sample using this new microwave tomography system is presented in this work.