Modelling of practical Salisbury screen absorbers

The Salisbury screen is a well known configuration of microwave absorber which is characterized by its simplicity of design and construction. The simple Salisbury screen is a narrowband device and consequently its practical applications are limited. Its simplicity, however, recommends it as a potential candidate for a calibration standard for free space reflectivity measurements of microwave absorber performance. It also forms the basis of more complicated multilayer structures-the so called Jaumann absorbers-whose wider bandwidth makes them much more popular. The paper explores the effects on reflectivity of finite thickness and departures from a pure resistance of the resistive layer, which prove to be surprisingly dramatic, and begins to investigate engineering models that could shed more light on the nature of its behaviour