An absorptive coding metasurface for ultra-wideband radar cross-section reduction

Abstract In this paper, an absorptive coding metasurface (ACM) is proposed for ultra-wideband radar cross section (RCS) reduction, the design process is presented in detail, in which a lossy polarization conversion metasurface (PCM) is proposed at first. The lossy PCM is an anisotropic resistive structure with both polarization conversion and absorption performances, so that its co-polarization reflection coefficients under u- and v-polarized incidences can be kept at less than − 10 dB in magnitude in the frequency range from 7.5 to 45.2 GHz. Though the magnitude of the cross-polarization reflection coefficient cannot be very small only due to the absorption, its phase will be changed by nearly 180° when the unit-cell structure of the lossy PCM is rotated by 90°. Thus, the lossy PCM can be used as one of the two types of lossy coding elements for an ACM when its unit-cell structure is rotated by 90° or not. Based on the lossy PCM, an ACM is proposed. The simulation and experimental results show that the ACM has an excellent RCS reduction performance under arbitrary polarized incidence, it can achieve effective RCS reduction under normal incidence in the ultra-wide frequency band from 7.4 to 45.5 GHz with a ratio bandwidth (f H/f L) of 6.15:1; moreover, an ultra-wideband RCS reduction can still be achieved when the incident angle is increased to 45°, which indicates that the ACM has good stealth performance under the detection of various radars working in X, Ku, K and Ka bands, it is very practical.