Structural broadband absorbing metamaterial based on three-dimensional printing technology

In order to verify the feasibility of three-dimensional (3D) printing technology in preparing the metamaterial absorbers with complex structure, a three-layer broadband absorbing metamaterial is designed and fabricated by 3D printing technology. The surface layer and middle layer of the metamaterial are composed of periodic arrays with different unit dimensions and the bottom layer of a slab structure. The optimized thickness of the metamaterial is 4.7 mm. A composite absorbent which consists of carbonyl iron powder and nylon is used to fabricate the absorber. In experiment, the obtained absorber is vertically irradiated by an electromagnetic (EM) wave. Two strong absorption peaks at 5.3 GHz and 14.1 GHz are achieved, with the reflection losses of -15.1 dB and -12.5 dB, respectively. The superposition of the two absorption peaks results in a reflection loss below -10 dB in a range from 4 to 18 GHz. The effective EM parameters of the surface layer and the middle layer are calculated by the S parameter inversion method. An effective model of the three-layer structure absorber is proposed and its reflectivity is calculated by using a multilayer structure reflectivity formula. The calculated reflectivity agrees well with the measured one. The absorbing and resonance mechanisms of the two absorption peaks are investigated by analyzing the dynamic distributions of power density loss, electric field and magnetic field. It can be clearly confirmed that the reflection losses at 5.3 GHz and 14.1 GHz are primarily concentrated on the bottom layer and surface layer, and the broadband absorption performance can be derived from the superposition of broadband absorptions of the three absorbing layers. Meanwhile, the strong electric coupling effect between the adjacent units in the surface layer is demonstrated by analyzing the electric-field distributions, which indicates that the strong reflection loss at 14.1 GHz is mainly caused by the electric response. The multiple scattering effects among the three layers are also considered according to the magnetic field distributions at two resonance frequencies. It is shown that there are two magnetic responses at 5.3 GHz and 14.1 GHz, respectively, and the multiple scattering contributes to increasing the EM wave propagation distance and enhancing the power loss. The designed absorbing metamaterials in this paper achieve good broadband absorption performances, particularly in the low frequency band. Combined with 3D printing rapid technology, a promising route to constructing 3D absorbing metamaterials with complex structures is proposed, which would be of great significance and broad practical prospect.