An efficient use of waste material for development of cost-effective broadband radar wave absorber

Abstract

Very few literatures are available on the utilization of natural waste composite materials for radar wave absorption. The main objective of this paper was to achieve good absorption with wide bandwidth corresponds to reflection loss (RL) ≤ −10 dB for less absorber layer thickness (≤2.0 mm) for a cost-effective production of radar wave absorber. In this study, mineral dust and beach sand-based waste composite material is critically analyzed for its application as broadband radar wave absorber in the frequency range of 8.2–12.4 GHz. A multilayer approach is applied for obtaining the good absorption, where thickness of different layers is optimized by genetic algorithm. The effective absorption bandwidth for two- and three-layer composite absorber is 3.5 and 2.8 GHz for the optimized thickness 1.9 and 1.8 mm, respectively. The two-layer absorber possesses measured RL of −27.20 dB at 10.8 GHz and for a three-layer absorber, RL reaches up to −32.58 dB at 11.2 GHz. The measured RL values agree quite well with the calculated ones, which show the effectiveness of absorber for various practical EM wave absorption applications.