Adjustably transmissive, reflective, and absorptive metamaterials

Abstract

Wireless devices are commonly carried in fabric-based apparel. Printing metamaterial structures on fabric substrates allows for the ability to create fabric metamaterial layers. A reconfigurable RF based fabric system simply by physically removing or adding different fabric-based metamaterial layers to different regions of the apparel. The fabric-based metamaterial can be used in various filtering applications where the control of phase, reflection angle, refraction angle, polarization, absorption, and transmission of the impinged electromagnetic wave can all be manipulated. Additionally, sophisticated metamaterial systems can be created by combining different metamaterial layers separated above each other. A controllable absorber metamaterial system can be made consisting of two layers. The first layer an electronically controllable that can controllably change between a band-pass and band-reject filter in a relevant frequency band and a second absorptive layer. Vehicles with adjustable metamaterial absorber systems, integrated on the outside or inside of the RF transparent fuselage, have the ability to control their radar cross section dynamically for the purposes of evading detection or spoofing their size by looking larger or similar to vehicles of different radar cross section.