Design and optimization of flexible metamaterials for microwave and infrared compatible stealth

Radome is the typical microwave (MW) and infrared (IR) source, but the stealth principles of these two bands are the contradictory, making it difficult to achieve MW-IR compatible camouflage with a single material. Metamaterials, due to their unique structure, can manipulate electromagnetic waves to achieve specific functions. In this paper, a compatible stealth flexible metamaterial is proposed, which can realize passband filtering in MW band and selective radiation in IR band. For achieving optimal IR selection radiation and maximum MW selective transmission, the inverse design is used for optimization. Accordingly, the flexible metamaterial integrates IR-MW compatible stealth, MW communication and radiation cooling. It shows low emissivity in the two main bands of IR detection (ε3~5 μm=0.098, ε8~14 μm=0.100), and relatively high emissivity outside these two bands (ε5~8 μm=0.513), while achieving a high transmittance of 98.8% in the WM band. This provides a reasonable guidance for the design of MW-IR stealth materials with specific frequency selection.