Ultra High Performance Radar Absorbing Material

ABSTRACT: There is a need for ultra-high performance RADAR absorbing materials (RAM), with performance characteristics superior to that offered by current technology, to be implemented for the testing and evaluation of aircraft level avionic and electronic warfare (EW) systems in an electromagnetically quiet environment at the Benefield Anechoic Facility (BAF). Current RAM implementations for anechoic chambers are capable of reducing specular reflection by up to 50 dB while handling incident power densities of up to 10 W/in2. This level of reflection reduction performance has, until recently, been acceptable for testing, but new technology, incorporating evermore sensitive electronics, requires new materials which meet strict performance criteria. Modern materials may offer a solution for increased performance of RAM. Using metamaterial absorbers (meta-RAM), an anechoic chamber with flat walls could potentially be realized. This would offer a much more convenient facility for installation of devices to be tested, mitigating the potential for damaging RAM. The use of materials such as the canonical metamaterial, the split-ring resonator (SRR), offer a convenient platform for creating absorbers as they are both electrically very small, with physical sizes smaller than the wavelength at resonance (~0.1 wavelengths). This proposal discusses the feasibility of implementing a metamaterial based RAM for use in the BAF. BENEFIT: This proposed RAM has the potential to realize anechoic chambers without large fragile foam pyramids to be damaged, opening the door for a wide array of applications for low-cost absorber implementations. This implementation also offers the customization inherent from the use of metamaterials with potential designs for a wide range of frequency bands based on the addition or subtraction of layers, each tuned for a specific band.