Design and Development of Ultra-Wideband Conformal Artificial Magnetic Conductor Metasurface for RCS Reduction

This work describes the design and development of an ultra-wideband conformal artificial magnetic conductor (AMC) metasurface for radar cross-section (RCS) reduction applications. The design comprises a single AMC unit cell and a single dielectric unit cell, absent of any metallic configuration on the top. The uniqueness of the proposed framework resides in the design of a singular AMC unit cell to produce a checkerboard pattern for ultra-wideband RCS reduction. The unit cell dimensions are 0.12λ<tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$L$</tex> in periodicity and 0.084λL in thickness, relative to the lowest frequency. The proposed configuration offers an ultra-wide bandwidth ranging from 2 GHz to 8.7 GHz, resulting in a fractional bandwidth of 125%. Furthermore, the proposed structure provides an angular stability of 50°. A thin substrate is selected for the design of the proposed metasurface which provides a conformability of 30°. The structure is fabricated and experimentally validated, yielding a favorable correlation with the simulated outcomes.