A Lay-up-Oriented CFRP-Substrate Metamaterial Absorber with High Insensitivity to Polarization

Abstract

Metamaterial absorbers with carbon fiber reinforced polymer (CFRP) substrates, which are called meta-CFRPs, are recently arisen for their excellent mechanical and electromagnetic performance. Different from traditional metamaterial absorbers with an isotropic substrate, meta-CFRPs with a highly anisotropic CFRP substrate are facing challenges in acquiring polarization-insensitive absorption. In this paper, a lay-up-oriented structure design method has been proposed to solve this problem. Considering the lay-up configuration of CFRP laminates, metallic patterns are designed under corresponding polarization angles and then united together to form an integral structure. A meta-CFRP with a typical CFRP lay-up configuration ([0°/45°/90°/-45°]3s) is designed and tested. The experimental results exhibit over 99% microwave absorptivity at 2.44 GHz for all polarization angles. The maximum shift among the resonance peak of the curves at all polarization angles is only 0.021 GHz. Further studies show that when there are cross-ply laminates in the first few layers of the CFRP substrate, the lay-up-oriented design method can be effectively simplified by ignoring the subsequent lay-up orientations after the first cross-ply layers. Our method can not only provide an effective way for acquiring polarization-insensitive microwave response on meta-CFRPs but also can be expected to be promoted to metamaterial absorbers with other anisotropic materials.

Experimental Investigation of the Anisotropic Thermal Conductivity of C/SiC Composite Thin Slab

“…Continuous fibers are usually introduced as reinforcement to improve the comprehensive performance of polymer and ceramic materials. [1][2][3] Carbon fiber-reinforced SiC matrix (C/SiC) composites combine the benefits of carbon fiber and a SiC matrix, which can be applied in thermal protection fields, such as in supersonic aircraft, rocket engines, nuclear reactors and gas turbines. [4][5][6] There are many SiC matrix composite manufacturing methods, such as liquid silicon infiltration, [7] polymer impregnation pyrolysis, [8] chemical vapor infiltration (CVI), [6] and reactive melt infiltration.…”