Simulation and experimental research on the absorption performance of flexible broadband metamaterial absorber

Abstract Existing flexible metamaterial absorbers (MAs) often suffer from drawbacks such as complex overall structures, high fabrication cost, large thickness, and narrow absorption bandwidth. To address these issues, a well-balanced flexible metamaterial absorber is designed, fabricated, and tested in this work. The proposed absorber consists of a periodic array of circular resistive films as the top resonant layer, a flexible polyvinyl chloride (PVC) slab as the intermediate dielectric layer, and a copper ground plane as the bottom layer. The structure is simple and is fabricated by a low-cost screen-printing process. The absorber exhibits an absorption higher than 90% in the 7.52–25 GHz frequency range with an overall thickness of 2.5 mm. Compared with some previously reported absorbers with complex geometries, the proposed design achieves a wider absorption bandwidth and a thinner profile; compared with other absorbers employing similarly simple patterns, it offers a lower operating frequency band together with a reduced thickness. For both TE and TM polarizations, the absorption remains above 80% as the incidence angle varies from 0° to 60°, indicating good angular stability and polarization insensitivity. Experimental measurements are in good agreement with the simulations, confirming the reliability of the numerical results. The present design provides a useful reference for the design and fabrication of high-performance flexible metamaterial absorbers.