Flexible Skin Traps Radar Waves and Cloaks Objects

March 21, 2016

This flexible, stretchable, and tunable meta-skin can trap radar waves and cloak objects from detection. (Liang Dong)

Iowa State University engineers developed a new flexible, stretchable, and tunable metamaterial skin that uses rows of small, liquid-metal devices to cloak an object from the sharp eyes of radar. By stretching and flexing the polymer meta-skin, it can be tuned to reduce the reflection of a wide range of radar frequencies.

When objects are wrapped in the meta-skin, the radar waves are suppressed in all incident directions and observation angles. The technology is different from traditional stealth technologies that often only reduce the backscattering, i.e., the power reflected back to a probing radar. One day, the meta-skin could coat the surface of the next generation of stealth aircraft – or provide a cloak of invisibility.

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