Design and development of low radar cross section antenna using hybrid metamaterial absorber

Abstract

An efficient approach is presented in this article, to reduce radar cross section (RCS) of a microstrip patch antenna, without affecting other radiation characteristics by the application of a novel hybrid metamaterial (MM) structure. The microstrip antenna is designed to operate at 4.2 GHz. Three different configurations of MM structures (ie, CB_1, CB_2, and hybrid) with splitted square and ring shaped two nonidentical MM cells are designed and critically analyzed in the range of 2‐18 GHz. A hybrid MM configuration is chosen for the design and implementation of low RCS antenna due to its exceptional performance as compared to CB_1 and CB_2. The hybrid MM is organized in chessboard configuration, comprises of splitted square and ring shaped MM unit cell. The results show that proposed antenna gives substantially out of band RCS reduction from 6 to 18 GHz and the proposed antenna has a lower RCS than the reference antenna. Proposed antenna attains wideband bandwidth around 7.4 GHz (ranging 2.0‐4.4 GHz, 7.8‐9.1 GHz, and 14.3‐18 GHz). The maximum reduction of −30.1 dBsm at 16.4 GHz is achieved in the hybrid MM structure impinged microstrip patch antenna. Finally, the fabrication and performance evaluation of MM loaded antenna is carried out. Moreover, measured results of the fabricated samples are closely matched with simulated results, which prove the effectiveness of the adopted approach for practical applications.

Development of diverse coding metamaterial structure for radar cross section reduction applications

“…Overall, the reference 24 manifests the highest RCS reduction values but it has the larger metamaterial compared to the rest of the designs. Meanwhile, the reference 25 possesses the second smallest metamaterial design but it only exhibits the least reduction value. Moreover, the reference 10 successfully reduced the RCS values to − 23 dBm 2 by adopting a 100 × 100 mm 2 metamaterial design.…”

Coding Metamaterial Analysis Based on 1-Bit Conventional and Cuboid Design Structures for Microwave Applications

“…For example, the biggest metamaterial design structure in [ 31 ] successfully produced near-zero monostatic RCS values at the absorption frequency range from 8.2 to 9.2 GHz. Meanwhile, the second largest metamaterial designs, in [ 28 , 30 ], with dimensions of 80 mm × 80 mm, achieved −30.1 dBm 2 and −23 dBm 2 at the peak point and 4.3 GHz, respectively. On the other hand, by adopting coding-based metamaterial, the monostatic RCS values can be reduced by adopting a smaller design structure, as in [ 29 ].…”

Synergizing meander line and heterogeneous composite for miniaturized hybrid microwave absorber

“…7,8 These absorbers can be classified into different types, such as circuit analogue absorbers, high-impedance absorbers, composites-based absorbers, metamaterial absorbers, among others. [9][10][11][12][13][14] Absorbers based on metamaterials have garnered significant interest due to their ability to achieve complete absorption of incident plane waves using remarkably thin layers. 12,15 However, it's worth noting that metamaterial absorbers often suffer from constrained bandwidth, which has been a limitation in their widespread adoption.…”