Research On The Metamaterial Stealth Radome

Metamaterial as one of the hot fields of the current domestic and internationalresearch, has received more and more attention. In recent years, along with thedevelopment and improvement of the metamaterial electromagnetic field control theory,metamaterial technology applied to the study of electromagnetic stealth has become animportant issue,which is also the most likely to bring revolutionary breakthrough in thestealth field. Based on the metamaterial electromagnetic field control theory, this paperwill introduce the metamaterial technology into the radome design to achieve the goalthat hiding the radar antenna system from electromagnetic detection and simultaneouslyguaranteeing the normal work of the radar antenna system within its operating band.At present, frequency selective surface (FSS) has been commonly employed intothe antenna radome design. The main mechanism of the FSS radome is to reflect theincident wave away from the incoming direction in order to minimize the RCS of theradar antenna system by means of its shape design. However, this method is easy to befound by multistatic radar detection. To solve this problem, this paper puts forward anovel design method of a metamaterial stealth radome, which could not only guaranteethe normal transmission of the radar antenna system within the operating band, but alsocould realize electromagnetic stealth out of its operating band without any reflection.The proposed metamaterial stealth radome comprises two parts: a metamaterial coverand a couple of matching strips, and it could exhibit two different operating modes bothinside and outside the working band of the radar antenna systems respectively. Whenthe frequency of the incident wave is out of the working band of the radar antennasystem, the metamaterial cover emerges as the “stealth” mode, which could guide theincident wave to exclude from the radar antenna system embedded inside the cover, andthen manipulate it to pass through the interface into the matching strips withoutreflection, finally absorb the incident wave inside the matching strips. When thefrequency of the electromagnetic wave is inside the working band of the radar antennasystem, the metamaterial cover emerges as the “transparent” mode, that is to say, theincident wave can propagate through the radome and to be accepted by the radarantenna system, and simultaneously the radar antenna system can radiateelectromagnetic wave outwardly through the metamaterial cover. With the dual-bandoperating mode, the proposed metamaterial stealth radome could realize the goal thathiding the radar antenna system from electromagnetic detection and simultaneouslyguaranteeing the normal work of the radar antenna system within its operating band.Numerical simulations by COMSOL software have been carried out in order to verifythe working effectiveness of the proposed metamaterial stealth radome. At the sametime, due to this proposed radome relies on the design of the metamaterial unit, in order to achieve this metamaterial stealth radome with the property of dual-band operatingmode, this paper also design a kind of tri-band metamaterial unit structure withcontrolled effective medium parameters, laying the foundation for the realization of theproposed metamaterial stealth radome.