Combining Pancharatnam-Berry Phase and Conformal Coding Metasurface for Dual-Band RCS Reduction

• Published in: IEEE transactions on antennas and propagation Vol. 70; no. 3; pp. 2352 - 2357
• Main Authors: Fu, Changfeng, Han, Lianfu, Liu, Chao, Lu, Xili, Sun, Zhijie
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York IEEE 01.03.2022; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Antenna arrays; Broadband; Computer simulation; Conformal coding metasurface; Curvature; Dispersion; Dual band; Encoding; Genetic algorithms; Metasurfaces; Microwave frequencies; Pancharatnam–Berry (PB) phase; radar cross section (RCS) reduction; Radar cross sections; Scattering
• ISSN: 0018-926X; 1558-2221
• DOI: 10.1109/TAP.2021.3112618

A flexible, dual-broadband, and polarization-insensitive coding metasurface is proposed to manipulate electromagnetic (EM) scattering in microwave frequency band. The 1 bit coding units "0" and "1" are formed by the Pancharatnam-Berry (PB) phase based on the same-sized meta-atoms with different orientations. The layout of the coding metasurface is obtained through genetic algorithm (GA). The simulation results indicate that the proposed coding metasurface in this communication can achieve more than 10 dB radar cross section (RCS) reduction in the range of 9.26-12.87 and 14.84-19.35 GHz in the planar case, which is attributed to the reorientation of the reflected energies into different directions by optimizing the coding sequence. The diffuse scattering performance in the dual-wideband is well maintained, while the coding metasurface is conformal on metallic cylinder with diverse curvature radii. Moreover, the scattering characteristics of conformal metasurfaces become better with the decrease of curvature radius under the case of the certain size of the flexible metasurface. A flexible coding metasurface prototype is prepared and measured. The experiment results coincide with the numerical simulation ones, demonstrating the outstanding capacity of RCS reduction. The proposed design has potential application value in the field of antenna and stealth of more complex objects.