A Monopole-Based Wideband Absorber for Ultra Large Angles

This article develops a broadband absorber by fully using the radiation features of monopole antennas for ultrawide-angle absorption application. A unit cell (UC) based on monopole antennas is proposed, and its working polarization is analyzed with the antenna reciprocity method and image theory. A wide-angle impedance matching layer is also introduced to further enhance the absorption at large angles. The optimized monopole-based UC reveals 90% absorptivity from 5.5-14.76 GHz at the incident angle of 80°. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time to report an absorber that can work perfectly under such ultrawide angles in a broadband manner. An 11 × 36 array is configured and simulated to verify the effectiveness of the monopole-based UC. The monostatic and bistatic scattering are both reduced significantly as well as other diffuse scattering directions from the simulated results. A prototype of 110 mm × 360 mm is fabricated and measured. Time gating methods are adopted to diminish the direct coupling effect. The measurements are in good agreement with the full-wave simulation results.