A Lightweight 3D Printed Metasurface for Wideband RCS Reduction

Abstract

This work presents a lightweight, 3-D printed metasurface for radar cross-section (RCS) reduction applications. The proposed unit cell geometry is based on a circular shaped metallic patch printed on a polylactic acid substrate terminated with a ground plane. Two different sets of unit cells are designed by varying the dielectric height to obtain a reflection phase difference of 180° ± 37°, such that a complete metasurface is resulted from these unit cells exhibiting a 10-dB RCS reduction bandwidth ranging from 8.1 GHz to 19.5 GHz. The novelty of the method lies in the utilization of the 3-D printing technique to vary the dielectric volume instead of only using different unit cell patterns, unlike used in the conventional phase cancellation method for RCS reduction. The proposed metasurface has been simulated using the finite element boundary integral technique and is observed as polarization-insensitive as well as angularly stable up to 30o incident angle. © 2024 IEEE.