Ultra-wideband flexible radar-infrared bi-stealth absorber based on a patterned graphene

Abstract

In this work, an ultra-wideband flexible radar absorber with low infrared emissivity for a radar-infrared bi-stealth application utilizing multilayer patterned graphene is proposed. The proposed absorber consists of three layers of graphene films with different patterns, flexible substrates, lightweight foam, and a ground layer. The flexible graphene films, rather than the conventional lumped resistors, are adopted as omnidirectional resistors to achieve dual polarization and flexibility. On the top of the absorber, an infrared shielding layer (IRSL) consists of patterned Indium tin oxide (ITO) separated by a thin foam layer. Due to the low-pass characteristics and the high filling ratio of the top ITO layer, the infrared emissivity of the whole structure is reduced effectively while the radar absorption property is slightly affected. As a result, the 90% absorption band is from 1.96 GHz to 20.72 GHz (fractional bandwidth 165.4%), with a low infrared emissivity of about 0.35. Besides, a miniaturized unit is achieved with the period of 0.079 λl at the lowest absorption frequency, and the oblique angle incidence response is up to 45° for TE mode and 60° for TM mode. A plane and a bending prototype are fabricated and measured, respectively. The screen-printing technology is adopted to print the graphene resistive films, and the measurement results agree well with the simulation.