Plasma-Enabled Adaptive Absorber for High-Power Microwave Applications

The feasibility of realizing an adaptive absorber subject to high-power microwave/electromagnetic (EM) pulse is investigated. To achieve this goal, a passive absorber based on circuit analog topology is designed and then embedded with active components to enable tunability/adaptivity of the absorption bandwidth. This tuning mechanism can be achieved using discrete plasma shells embedded in a low-profile frequency selective surface-based absorber. The absorption center frequency and bandwidth can be tuned by controlling the plasma frequency. A systematic design guide is presented to explain the working principle of the proposed absorber. The proposed design is insensitive to the polarization, and the absorption bandwidth is enhanced by controlling two spectrally overlapped resonances. A full wave EM simulation is performed to present the performance of the proposed absorber. Finally, the peak power handling capability of the active absorber has been investigated.