Polarization Insensitive, Wide-Angle, Ultra-wideband, Flexible, Resistively Loaded, Electromagnetic Metamaterial Absorber using Conventional Inkjet-Printing Technology

A novel, polarization insensitive, wide-angle and broadband electromagnetic metamaterial absorber, which can cover either a flat or a bent geometry, is presented in this work. The periodic geometry has a unit-cell, which consists of four split ring resonators, which are sequentially rotated around the unit-cell axis progressively by 90 deg. First, the metallic parts of the geometry consists of low resistivity copper traces. Next, in order to increase the frequency bandwidth, resistively loaded traces, printed by conventional inkjet printer are used to replace the copper ones. For normal incidence, simulated and measurement results shown that the proposed flat absorber exhibits absorption efficiency higher than 0.8 for 6.9–29.9 GHz (i.e., bandwidth of 125%) regardless of polarization, while the curved absorber for 6.6–29 GHz (i.e., bandwidth of 126%) or for 10.5–29.6 GHz (i.e., bandwidth of 95%), depending the polarization. For oblique incidence and for TE or TM polarized incident wave it presents bandwidth of 118% (7.7–29.9 GHz) or 100.5% (9.9–29.9 GHz), respectively, for an incident angular range of 0–45 deg. Finally, the proposed absorber has thickness of 3.89 mm, corresponding to λ/11.7 at its lowest operation frequency.