Microwave energy is beamed out by Radar systems and anything that would reflect it would be detected. Something through which these waves would be absorbed would succeed in being unnoticed and it is the belief of the team that this can be done by the tunable new material at UHF or Ultra-High Frequency.
Development of other cloaking materials has been seen before, but these creations weren’t suitable for applying to aircrafts owing to their thickness. A plane can look like birds. Wenhua Xu, a scientist has made a claim that this material created by the group is 10 times thinner as compared to traditional absorbers.
The findings were detailed by the team in the Journal of Applied Physics. A metal slab is usually on top of the layer made of thin metal honeycomb. Below that, there is an ‘active frequency selective material’ which is made up of a 0.04 mm layer or copper capacitors and resistors. Stretching of the AFSS layer is possible for providing lots of absorption. However, it is very thin for going onto aircrafts.
“Our proposed absorber is almost ten times thinner than conventional ones,” said Wenhua Xu, one of the team members from China’s Huazhong University of Science and Technology, in a statement.
Billions may have been spent by the military in the research and development of this new aircraft. However, this performance isn’t sufficient for succeeding in the battle. Just like how the color-changing wraps work in the automotive industry, this material too tunes itself to suit various detection frequencies. Therefore, it protects against a large group of radar scans.
Now, a far lighter and a thinner stealth material has been developed by scientists in China. It can be argued that owing to varying degrees of stealth technology, the US military could dominate in the last century and majority of technological gains were stopped.
The Stealth capabilities of the F 35 are often touted as the most valuable feature of Jet. However, in the year 2009, China got an ability of stealing design as well as electronic data related to the program.
