‘Meta-Skin’ Offers Radar Invisibility

In the realm of warfare, if your enemy cannot see you, they cannot find you. And that alone would have given you a large tactical advantage for sure on the battlefield. Well, the magical invisible cloak has yet to be invented or conjured up by witchcraft and wizardry, but thankfully, the realm of science has made its fair share of advancements when it comes to stealth technology. This time around, it is yet another version of skin that can be stretched, effectively trapping and suppresses radar waves.

Not quite the ‘octopus skin’ that we saw cover a stretchable robot earlier last week, but rather, this cloaking technology will be able to allow a person or even a vehicle get around undetected. Needless to say, the military would be more than happy to check out the potential applications that they can use this in the field of war, and it would include coating next-generation stealth bombers with such material for that added advantage.

The brains behind this meta-skin? A team at Iowa State University that is helmed by electrical and computer engineering professor Jiming Song alongside associate professor Liang Dong. Rows of small split-ring resonators have been embedded within the silicone sheets, and these resonators carry the liquid metal alloy galinstan, which is able to be tuned to trap and suppress specific radar frequencies as it stretches out.

In tests, the meta-skin successfully achieved a radar suppression of approximately 75% in the 8 to 10 gigahertz range. which is the band that sees action in civil marine radar, tracking radar, airborne weather avoidance radar, and systems for detecting mortar and artillery projectiles.

Edwin Kee
Categories: General
Tags: Science