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IEEE ANTENNAS AND WIRELESS PROPAGATION LETTERS, VOL. 11, 2012

Upper Bound for the Bandwidth of Ultrathin Absorbers Comprising High Impedance Surfaces
Yongqiang Pang, Haifeng Cheng, Yongjiang Zhou, and Jun Wang
AbstractIn this letter, the equivalent circuit method is employed to derive an upper bound for the bandwidth of ultrathin absorbers comprising high impedance surfaces. It is found that the maximum bandwidth is linearly determined by the thickness and the permeability of substrates. The proposed bound can be applied to ultrathin absorbers with frequency dispersive substrates. The mechanism of broadening bandwidth by the use of frequency dispersive substrates is discussed to provide guidelines for designing wideband ultrathin absorbers. Numerical examples are presented to illustrate the analytical results and show that the proposed upper bound can provide acceptable prediction of the maximum achievable bandwidth. Index TermsBandwidth, high impedance surfaces, ultrathin absorbers, upper bound.

Fig. 1. The considered ultrathin absorber comprising the high impedance surface: (a) front view and (b) side view.

I. INTRODUCTION IGH impedance surfaces have been widely employed in the design of ultrathin (much less than the wavelength at the operating frequency) absorbers [1][5]. These absorbers are usually realized by placing periodic metallic or low-loss arrays on the front of ultrathin grounded substrates. The working principle has been explained as the resonant phenomenon between the surface impedance of grounded substrates and that of arrays [4], [6], and these ultrathin absorbers suffer from the narrowband absorption feature [1][6]. Therefore, how to improve the bandwidth is an important issue in the design of ultrathin absorbers. In order to reveal factors determining the maximum bandwidth of ultrathin absorbers, a limit has been derived in [7], but it only is applicable for ultrathin absorbers with frequency nondispersive substrates. In addition, the authors in [7] also pointed out that the bandwidth limit of ultrathin absorbers with frequency dispersive substrates can be determined by Rozanovs limit reported in [8]. However, it is the static permeability that determines the Rozanovs limit and usually has high value for ferromagnetic materials; thus, the achieved bandwidth of ultrathin absorbers lies below this limit. To reveal all-side factors determining the maximum bandwidth and show if there is room for improvement of the achieved bandwidth, a more accurate limit is needed. In this letter, we present an upper bound for the bandwidth of ultrathin absorbers by means

of the equivalent circuit model. The proposed upper bound can be applied to ultrathin absorbers with frequency dispersive substrates, but tighter than Rozanovs limit. In particular, the mechanism of broadening the bandwidth by use of substrates with frequency dispersive permeability is investigated. Finally, some numerical examples of ultrathin absorbers with the same substrate thickness of 0.8 mm are presented and discussed. II. ANALYTICAL MODEL FOR ULTRATHIN ABSORBERS A. Equivalent Circuit Model of Ultrathin Absorbers The ultrathin absorber comprising the high impedance surface is realized by placing a patch array over an arbitrary grounded substrate, as shown in Fig. 1(a) and (b). This structure can be modeled as a shunt admittance at the end of a shorted transmission line [2], [6], [9]. The admittance of the grounded substrate with thickness of for the normal incidence is [2] (1) and are the relative complex where permeability and permittivity of the grounded substrate, respectively. is the free-space admittance, and is the wavenumber of the incident wave in the substrate. Taking into account the approximate relation for the ultrathin substrate, (1) can readily transform to , where is the speed of light. For the capacitive patch array, the circuit can approximately represent the equivalent admittance at low frequency range [5] (2) In general, the metallic or low-loss arrays are needed to synin (2) usually thesize ultrathin absorbers, i.e., the value of at low-frequency is small. We can assume that . range, and then (2) can be simplied as The equivalent admittance of the patch array is in parallel to that

Manuscript received January 06, 2012; accepted February 08, 2012. Date of publication February 15, 2012; date of current version March 19, 2012. This work was supported by the Aeronautical Science Foundation of China. The authors are with the Key Laboratory of Advanced Ceramic Fibers and Composites, College of Aerospace and Materials Engineering, National University of Defense Technology, Changsha 410073, China (e-mail: 225pang@163. com). Digital Object Identier 10.1109/LAWP.2012.2188131

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of the grounded substrate, so the total equivalent admittance of the ultrathin absorber is given by (3)

B. Bandwidth Limit of Ultrathin Absorbers The circuit model has been used to study the limitation on the bandwidth of articial magnetic conductor surfaces by Brewitt-Taylor [10]. Here, we follow this idea to investigate the upper bound for the bandwidth of ultrathin absorbers. From the viewpoint of matching conditions for reducing reectivity, the equivalent admittance of absorbers should yield both and simultaneously. If the conductance can be matched with the free-space admittance in the considered frequency range, then the wider bandwidth corresponds to the smaller slope of the susceptance versus frequency in the vicinity of the resonance frequency. Therefore, the derivative of the susceptance with the angular frequency can be used to investigate the upper bound of the bandwidth (4) From (3), it can be observed clearly that the slope of the susceptance is always positive. This actually can be derived easily according to Fosters reactive theorem [11]. Therefore, we can nd (5) To clearly illustrate the process of deriving the upper bound, Fig. 2(a) shows a typical susceptance versus frequency of an ultrathin absorber. As a simple example, the permittivity of the dielectric substrate is assumed to be 6.0(1-j0.1), and the relevant thickness is 0.8 mm. The absorption frequency is 10 GHz. To maximize the 10-dB absorption bandwidth, the approximate full-wave method combined with the genetic algorithm was used to optimize the surface resistance , and parameters and shown in Fig. 1(a). The optimized results are sq, mm, and mm, respectively. Fig. 2(b) shows the reectivity of the optimized absorber. For small change of the angular frequency in the vicinity of the resonant frequency determined by , the susceptance versus frequency can be approximated by a straight line as shown in Fig. 2(a), so that can be replaced by . According to (1) and (5), it can be obtained (6) where is the complex conjugate of permeability. After some algebraic manipulations, it can be given by (7) where is the wavelength of the resonant frequency . If the required reectivity is equal to from the ultrathin absorber, the following relation can be found:

Fig. 2. (a) Typical susceptance of the equivalent admittance. (b) Simulated reection coefcient of a 0.8 mm thick absorber.

(8) From (8), the maximum value of can be obtained (9) Therefore, for the ultrathin absorber with the given reectivity, as shown in Fig. 2(a). Substituting (9) into (7), an upper bound for the bandwidth of ultrathin absorbers can be derived as (10) This relation provides an upper bound for the bandwidth of arbitrary ultrathin absorbers comprising high impedance surfaces. If the permeability of substrates is frequency dispersive in the operating frequency range , the upper bound (10) should be modied as (11)

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IEEE ANTENNAS AND WIRELESS PROPAGATION LETTERS, VOL. 11, 2012

where is the maximum value in the operating fre. Furthermore, if and the maxquency range imum value of the real part is , (11) can be simplied as (12) It can be found that the proposed upper bound (12) is twice that of the limit published in [7]. The difference is the result of that the proposed limit (12) is valid for ultrathin absorbers with frequency dispersive magnetic as well as dielectric substrates. This is consistent with the conclusion in [7] that the bandwidth can be increased by more than two times by using the proper frequency dispersive substrate. However, the proposed limit is tighter than Rozanovs limit. Besides, the proposed limit is not related to the permittivity of thin substrates. According to [7], this is due to the fact that variation of the geometrical parameters such as and shown in Fig. 1(a) can have the similar effect to the permittivity. To the end, it should be noted that the proposed limit is only applicable to the case of normal incidence. C. Effect of Substrate Permeability on Bandwidth Let us now investigate the effect of the substrate permeability on the bandwidth of ultrathin absorbers and provide a comprehension on the mechanism of broadening the bandwidth by the use of ferromagnetic substrates. According to matching conditions once again, we can obtain and for absorbing the incidence wave, with (13) (14) From (14), it can be obtained at (15) For the low-loss ferromagnetic substrates, that (15) can be simplied as , so (16) It can be seen that the use of substrates with frequency dispersive permeability as can make sure that the resonant condition can be fullled over a wide frequency range, and then a wide bandwidth may be obtained. Certainly, in order to achieve a wideband absorption performance factually, it is also needed to choose proper parameters expressed in (13) to make sure the impedance is matched with the free-space impedance . III. NUMERICAL ILLUSTRATIONS To demonstrate the above considerations, we analyze some different ultrathin absorbers with the same thickness of 0.8 mm. For samples 14, the substrate permittivity is assumed to be constant all the same, while the permeability with the form of ( 0, 1, 2 and 3 for samples 14, respectively.) are used to demonstrate its inuence on the maximum bandwidth, where the unit of frequency is in gigahertz. The larger value implies the greater value of permeability in the operating frequency range and the stronger frequency dispersive behavior. Based on the assumed substrates, the dimensions of and and surface resistance of patch arrays were optimized for maximizing the 10-dB absorption bandwidth, and the reection coefcients of optimized absorbers are shown in Fig. 3. The absorption frequency is kept constant 10 GHz all the same. Optimized values of , , and are summarized in Table I. This table also presents the maximum bandwidth of the optimized absorbers, bandwidth limits, and achievement ratio. The achievement ratio is dened as the ration of the maximum bandwidth to the bandwidth limit [12]. To compare to absorbers with ferromagnetic substrates, the results shown in Fig. 2 are also summarized in Table I and referred to as sample 0. It can be observed clearly that parameters and of samples 14 are smaller than that of sample 0. This is due to the fact that the geometry factors are associated with the operating wavelength in substrates [9]. By comparing the maximum bandwidth with bandwidth limit in Table I, it can be found that limits computed by (12) can show acceptable prediction for the maximum bandwidth of optimized absorbers. Furthermore, the last row in Table I indicates that the substrate with the stronger frequency dispersive behavior (corresponding to the lager ) can result in the larger achievement ratio, which is coincident with the preceding analytical result. Therefore, we can use the ferromagnetic materials with the high

Fig. 3. Reection coefcients of 0.8-mm-thick absorbers based on the assumed substrates. TABLE I OPTIMIZED RESULTS OF ULTRATHIN ABORBERS

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substrates with the high and strong frequency dispersive permeability are needed for obtaining wideband absorbers. Some numerical examples based on different substrates haven been presented, and it is indicated that the proposed upper bound can predict the maximum achievable bandwidth acceptably. REFERENCES
[1] N. Engheta, Thin absorbing screens using metamaterial surfaces, in Proc. IEEE Antennas Propag. Soc. Int. Symp., 2002, vol. 2, pp. 392395. [2] S. A. Tretyakov and S. I. Maslovski, Thin absorbing structure for all incidence angles based on the use of a high-impedance surface, Microw. Opt. Technol. Lett., vol. 38, no. 3, pp. 175178, Aug. 2003. [3] G. Gao, Y. Yin, D. B. Yan, and N. C. Yuan, Application of metamaterials to ultra-thin radar-absorbing material design, Electron. Lett., vol. 41, p. 936, 2005. [4] O. Luukkonen, F. Costa, C. R. Simovski, A. Monorchio, and S. A. Tretyakov, A thin electromagnetic absorber for wide incidence angles and both polarizations, IEEE Trans. Antennas Propag., vol. 57, no. 10, pp. 31193125, Oct. 2009. [5] A. Kazemzadeh, A. Karlsson, and M. Gustafsson, Theory, design and characterization of ultra thin absorbers, in Proc. 4th Swedish Conf. Comput. Electromagn., Methods Appl., Lund, Sweden, Oct. 1819, 2007, pp. 1926. [6] F. Costa, A. Monorchio, and G. Manara, Analysis and design of ultra thin electromagnetic absorbers composing resistively loaded high impedance surfaces, IEEE Trans. Antennas Propag., vol. 58, no. 5, pp. 15511558, May 2010. [7] R. Huang, L. B. Kong, and S. Matitsine, Bandwidth limit of an ultrathin metamaterial screen, J. Appl. Phys., vol. 106, p. 074908, 2009. [8] K. N. Rozanov, Ultimate thickness to bandwidth ratio of radar absorbers, IEEE Trans. Antennas Propag., vol. 48, no. 8, pp. 12301234, Aug. 2000. [9] B. A. Munk, Frequency Selective SurfacesTheory and Design. New York: Wiley, 2000. [10] C. R. Brewitt-Taylor, Limitation on the bandwidth of articial perfect magnetic conductor surfaces, Microw. Antennas Propag., vol. 1, no. 1, pp. 255260, 2007. [11] R. E. Collin, Foundations for Microwave Engineering, 2nd ed. New York: IEEE & Wiley, 2001. [12] M. F. Samani and R. Saan, On the bandwidth limitation and operating frequency in articial magnetic conductors, IEEE Antennas Wireless Propag. Lett., vol. 9, pp. 228231, 2010. [13] A. Fallahi, A. Yahaghi, H. Benedickter, H. Abiri, M. Shahabadi, and C. Hafner, Thin wideband radar absorbers, IEEE Trans. Antennas Propag., vol. 58, no. 12, pp. 40514058, Dec. 2010.

Fig. 4. Reection coefcients of 0.8-mm-thick absorbers based on real ferromagnetic material proposed in [13].

and strong frequency dispersive permeability as substrates to design wideband and ultrathin absorbers. We have also simulated some ultrathin absorbers based on real ferromagnetic material. This material has been proposed in [13] for designing absorbers. The thickness of ultrathin absorbers is 0.8 mm again, but the absorption frequencies are 10, 8, and 6 GHz and numbered 5, 6, and 7, respectively. The optimized results are summarized in Table I, and reection coefcients are illustrated in Fig. 4. It can be found that the proposed upper bound (11) also can provide a good estimation for the maximum bandwidth of real ultrathin absorbers. IV. CONCLUSION An upper bound for the bandwidth of ultrathin absorbers utilizing high impedance surfaces has been derived with the equivalent circuit method. The proposed bound is tighter than Rozanovs limit, but shows the similar dependence of the substrate thickness and permeability. It has been shown that