Lightweight and broadband metamaterial absorber based on ITO impedance film

In this paper, we present a lightweight, broadband metamaterial absorber that exhibits polarization stability and is insensitive to incident angles. The absorber is composed of one layer of indium tin oxide impedance surface, three layers of quartz fiber composite material, and one layer of paper honeycomb on a metal sheet. Our proposed absorber has a 90 % absorptivity bandwidth of 13.19 GHz, ranging from 4.83 GHz to 18.12 GHz at TEM plane wave normal incidence, covering the entire X and Ku band. We illustrate the variation of design parameters and the distribution of electromagnetic field and current to investigate the absorption mechanism. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our design, we fabricate a prototype sample and measure its absorption performance. The results show a bandwidth of 12.38 GHz, ranging from 4.91 GHz to 17.29 GHz, with a low profile of 0.095λL at the lowest operating frequency. The experimental results are in good agreement with the numerical simulation, effectively verifying our proposed design.