Design of a tunable frequency selective surface absorber as a loaded receiving antenna array

Abstract

An effective approach to designing a tunable electromagnetic absorber is presented and experimentally verified; it is based on an idea that an existing frequency selective surface (FSS) absorber is regarded as a loaded receiving antenna array. The existing absorber is effectively simplified by withdrawing half of the loaded resistors; a more compact one is obtained when lumped capacitors are introduced. Building on this, a varactor-tunable absorber with a proper bias network is proposed. Numerical simulations of one tunable absorber with 1.6 mm in thickness show that a wide tuning range from 3.05 GHz to 1.96 GHz is achieved by changing the capacitance of the loaded varactor from 0.5 pF to 5.0 pF. An experiment is carried out using a rectangular waveguide measurement setup and excellent agreement between the simulated and measured results is demonstrated.