Design and Development of Expanded Graphite-Based Non-metallic and Flexible Metamaterial Absorber for X-band Applications

The possibility of using expanded graphite instead of a metallic layer as unit cells and ground planes for metamaterial absorbers in X-band is investigated. A metamaterial absorber was fabricated on a flexible linear low-density polyethylene substrate using an expanded graphite-based circular ring as the unit cell structure. The unit cell was simulated and optimized for which the metamaterial absorber exhibited 98.9% absorption at 11.22 GHz. The fabricated expanded graphite-based absorber showed a reflection loss of -24.51 dB at 11.56 GHz with -10 dB bandwidth of 0.39 GHz (3.37%). The performance of the same structure with copper was also measured. The expanded graphite-based metamaterial absorber showed enhanced performance as compared to the copper-based metamaterial absorber. The width of the ring was varied to tune the reflection loss. The proposed expanded graphite-based metamaterial absorber possesses the advantages of being ultra-thin, flexible and non-corrosive.