Integrated lightweight gradient honeycomb metastructure with microwave absorption and mechanical properties: Analysis, design, and verification

Integrated lightweight metastructures with microwave absorption and mechanical properties are of great significance in practical applications, but so far relevant study is still lacking. In this paper, an integrated lightweight gradient honeycomb metastructure (GHM) was proposed using 3D printing and screen printing technologies. Using the equivalent circuit method (ECM), we provided an in-depth analysis of how to broaden the absorption bandwidth and derived the mathematical formula of the equivalent resistance of the hexagon loop. The simulation results reveal that the proposed metastructure has the characteristics of broadband absorption, polarization insensitivity, oblique incidence stability, and radar cross section (RCS) suppression in the operating frequency range. The measured results are in good agreement with the simulation ones. In addition, the compression test results show that the metastructure has good compression strength. This work provides a route to achieve integrated metastructures with thin, lightweight, excellent absorption and mechanical properties.