title: Experimental Demonstration of Printed Graphene Nano-flakes Enabled Flexible and Conformable Wideband Radar Absorbers.
abstract: In this work, we have designed, fabricated and experimentally characterized a printed graphene nano-flakes enabled flexible and conformable wideband radar absorber. The absorber covers both X (8-12 GHz) and Ku (12-18 GHz) bands and is printed on flexible substrate using graphene nano-flakes conductive ink through stencil printing method. The measured results show that an effective absorption (above 90%) bandwidth spans from 10.4 GHz to 19.7 GHz, namely a 62% fraction bandwidth, with only 2 mm thickness. The flexibility of the printed graphene nano-flakes enables the absorber conformably bending and attaching to a metal cylinder. The radar cross section (RCS) of the cylinder with and without absorber attachment has been compared and excellent absorption has been obtained. Only 3.6% bandwidth reduction has been observed comparing to that of un-bended absorber. This work has demonstrated unambiguously that printed graphene can provide flexible and conformable wideband radar absorption, which extends the graphene's application to practical RCS reductions.
authors.affiliation: School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, University of Manchester, Manchester, M13 9PL, UK.
authors.forename: Xianjun
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Huang
authors.affiliation: School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, University of Manchester, Manchester, M13 9PL, UK.
authors.forename: Kewen
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Pan
authors.affiliation: School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, University of Manchester, Manchester, M13 9PL, UK.
authors.forename: Zhirun
authors.initials: Z
authors.lastname: Hu