A lightweight concrete composite material with improved EMI shielding by using a chiral particle array

Abstract

This paper proposes a structure for concrete composite materials for electromagnetic interference shielding applications. It comprises an array of helical-shaped conductive particles as chiral additives. Unlike the previous studies using large quantities of conductive additives, this study provides a lightweight concrete composite due to the utilization of a small number of additives with a high level of shielding effectiveness in a wide frequency range. The heart of the proposed structure lies in leveraging the evanescent wave propagation in a circular waveguide, resulting in considerable shielding effectiveness. Under particular conditions, the helical particles can imitate a below-cutoff cylindrical waveguide and its dominant mode surface current on the helical wire. This phenomenon significantly attenuates the transmitted power from the array of helical particles in its resonance frequency range. Besides presenting the composition that exploits the magnetoelectric properties of the particles, this paper compares it with a traditional concrete composite, including randomly distributed sinusoidal steel rods. This second approach is examined using both experimental measurement and full-wave simulation methods. The results of this study indicate that the appropriate geometry of the conductive additives, in this case, chiral particles, and their arrangement in a regular array rather than a random distribution can enhance the efficiency of the conductive additives. This idea paves the way for more robust, efficient, and lightweight concrete composite materials, thanks to the recent advances in modern civil engineering manufacturing methods.