Pangolin-inspired stretchable, microwave-invisible metascale

• Main Authors: Wang, Changxian, Lv, Zhisheng, Mohan, Manoj Prabhakar, Cui, Zequn, Liu, Zhihua, Jiang, Ying, Li, Jiaofu, Wang, Cong, Pan, Shaowu, Muhammad Faeyz Karim, Liu, Ai Qun, Chen, Xiaodong
• Other Authors: School of Materials Science and Engineering
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: 2022
• Subjects: Engineering::Materials; Conformability; Microwave Absorption
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/156391
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Microwave-invisible devices are emerging as a valuable technology in various applications, including soft robotics, shape-morphing structures, and textural camouflages, especially in electronic countermeasures. Unfortunately, conventional microwave-absorbing metastructures and bulk absorbers are stretching confined, limiting their application in deformable or special-shaped targets. To overcome such limitations, a conceptually novel soft-rigid-connection strategy, inspired by the pangolin, is proposed. Pangolin-inspired metascale (PIMS), which is a kind of stretchable metamaterial consisting of an electromagnetic dissipative scale (EMD-scale) and elastomer, is rationally designed. Such a device exhibits robust microwave-absorbing capacity under the interference of 50% stretching. Besides, profiting from the covering effect and size-confined effect of EMD-scale, the out-of-plane indentation failure force of PIMS is at least 5 times larger than conventional device. As a proof of concept, the proposed device is conformally pasted on nondevelopable surfaces. For a spherical dome surface, the maximum radar cross-section (RCS) reduction of PIMS is 6.3 dB larger than that of a conventional device, while for a saddle surface, the bandwidth of 10 dB RCS reduction exhibits an increase of 83%. In short, this work provides a conceptually novel platform to develop stretchable, nondevelopable surface conformable functional devices.