Thin Radar Absorber Using an Artificial Magnetic Ground Plane

This paper provides experimental and numerical simulation verification of the radar absorbing properties of an ultra-thin radar absorber. The absorber takes the form of an artificial magnetic conductor with surface mounted resistors. Electromagnetic simulations show the confinement of current distributed across the surface which results as a consequence of plane wave excitation. For the first time it was shown experimentally that with this arrangement better than -17 dB reflection loss can be obtained at 4.64 GHz, it is also shown that the structure exhibits azimuthal variation in reflected energy under plane wave excitation of less than 2 dB. Further we show that under linear polarization excitation that the structure can be further simplified by resistor removal, and that the 0deg artificial magnetic conductor reflection phase condition does not necessarily provide optimum reduction in reflected energy