Design, Fabrication and Characteristics of Microwave Absorbing Materials in Stealth Application: A review

Abstract

The paper presents a perspective view of the current research in developing variety of microwave absorbing materials suitable for stealth application and electromagnetic interference (EMI) minimization. The stealth technology refers to reduction in radar cross-section (RCS), a measure of aircraft signature so as to make it nearly invisible to the enemy’s tracking system up to a certain distance for certain frequency, for a successful air operation. The reduction in RCS is achieved by coating the object with microwave absorbing material. The paper also describes techniques to achieve optimum absorption for specific range of operation in terms of its electric and magnetic properties, thickness and order of layers in multilayered microwave absorbing materials, including frequency selective surfaces (FSS) or circuit analog (CA), as well. These provide more design options by introducing inductive and capacitive loss mechanisms in addition to resistive loss.