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

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.

Automated summary

A flexible, dual-broadband, and polarization-insensitive coding metasurface is proposed to manipulate electromagnetic scattering in the microwave frequency band. By optimizing the coding sequence, the proposed metasurface achieves more than 10 dB reduction in radar cross section within a specific range.