materialsscienceandengineering:
‘Meta-Skin’ Truly Cloaks Objects From Radar
It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s…wait, I don’t see anything there. Stealth aircraft could get even harder to detect with a new flexible, stretchy metamaterial that effectively traps and suppresses radar waves.
The cloaking tech has potential military applications, including coating next-generation stealth bombers.
A team at Iowa State University led by electrical and computer engineering professor Jiming Song and associate professor Liang Dong developed a metamaterial they’re calling “meta-skin.”
Metamaterials are manmade materials that have capabilities greater than the sum of their individual components. While cartoonist Randall Munroe sadly doesn’t have an entry for them in his “Thing Explainer” book, his xkcd comic strip does. Having learned about the physical feats some can pull off, I think they’re kind of magical.
The engineers at Iowa State University created their metamaterial by embedding rows of tiny split-ring resonators inside silicone sheets. These resonators contain the liquid metal alloy galinstan, which is gallium, indium, and tin. It’s used commercially and has low toxicity compared to other liquid metals. I even found some on Amazon.com.
Looks really cool.
via Tumblr http://bit.ly/1SIdmsV
