Manufacture and characterization of stealth wind turbine blade with periodic pattern surface for reducing radar interference

This paper presents a stealth wind turbine blade that reduces signal interference with electromagnetic wave based surrounding infrastructures. This study employed a method based on periodic patterns made of resistive materials to reduce the reflected radar signals from the wind blades. The wind blade with a lossy periodic pattern surface can absorb the incident electromagnetic energy and decrease the radar cross section. In this study, the periodic pattern surface was design with the radar absorbing characteristics at 10.0 GHz frequency. The fabricated lossy periodic pattern surface was applied to the outer surface of the wind blade in order to achieve radar absorbing characteristics. The measure results show that the radar cross section of the stealth wind blade section was reduced by more than 90% for whole azimuth angles at the target frequency. (C) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.