Design and manufacturing of lightweight modular broadband microwave absorbing metastructure

This study presents a novel approach for developing modular and lightweight microwave absorbing metastructure using additive manufacturing technology. Drawing inspiration from Lego blocks, we utilize a composite process of 2D and 3D printing to manufacture the metastructures. Firstly, the correlation between the square ring size, thickness and absorption bandwidth is established. Then, a multilayer stacking method is utilized to increase the absorption bandwidth and achieve a modular design for the composite structure, enabling various module splicing. Furthermore, the metastructures are manufactured using ABS and printed with the composite carbon paste on its unit structure to obtain the absorbing ability. Finally, the simulation results show the structure can achieve more than 90% absorption in 3.5–25.7 GHz while the measured results can achieve more than 80% absorption in 2.7–25.2 GHz. When the incident angle is up to 60°, it can keep more than 80% absorption with excellent angle-insensitive characteristics.