A Novel Chip Resistor Spacecloth For Radar Absorbing Materials

Abstract

Spacecloth design and development is vital and crucial in Radar Absorbing Materials (RAM) for achieving Low Observability in an Aircraft or an Unmanned Air Vehicle(UAV). The RAM design translates into the spacecloth design. The spacecloths form the constituent layers in a broadband Jaumann absorber in which case they have to be designed for various values of surface resistivity. The design specifications of spacecloth(s) in RAMS is well understood and documented in literature. But the design of spacecloth hitherto, has been the domain of materials' scientists wherein the specified properties of the spacecloth are achieved by an iterative, trial and error process, by mixing various constituents in different proportions to get the design specified surface resistivity in the final end-product. In an effort to bridge this gap, a novel spacecloth for RAM applications is proposed in the thesis. It is proposed that a repetitive geometrical grid network of chip resistors simulates spacecloth. The sheet resistivity of the spacecloth is derived by analyzing various geometries like square, rectangle, triangle and hexagonal grids. The transmission and reflection loss for the chip resistor spacecloth is derived. The design of chip resistor spacecloths for operation at S and C bands is given followed by experimental verification using waveguide simulator experiments. Numerical study of multilayer RAM has been carried out with exponential taper variation of surface resistivities for constituent spacecloth layers and design curves are given for multilayer RAM both for normal and oblique incidence for TE and TM polarizations.