An extremely wideband and lightweight metamaterial absorber

This paper presents a three-dimensional microwave metamaterial absorber based on the stand-up resistive film patch array. The absorber has wideband absorption, lightweight, and polarization-independent properties. Our design comes from the array of unidirectional stand-up resistive film patches backed by a metallic plane, which can excite multiple standing wave modes. By rolling the resistive film patches as a square enclosure, we obtain the polarization-independent property. Due to the multiple standing wave modes, the most incident energy is dissipated by the resistive film patches, and thus, the ultra-wideband absorption can be achieved by overlapping all the absorption modes at different frequencies. Both the simulated and experimental results show that the absorber possesses a fractional bandwidth of 148.2% with the absorption above 90% in the frequency range from 3.9 to 26.2 GHz. Moreover, the proposed absorber is extremely lightweight. The areal density of the fabricated sample is about 0.062 g/cm(2), which is approximately equivalent to that of eight stacked standard A4 office papers. It is expected that our proposed absorber may find potential applications such as electromagnetic interference and stealth technologies. (C) 2015 AIP Publishing LLC.