{"id":181824,"date":"2016-03-07T18:38:00","date_gmt":"2016-03-07T23:38:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2016\/03\/07\/first-civil-application-will-be-on-car-bras\/"},"modified":"2016-03-07T18:38:00","modified_gmt":"2016-03-07T23:38:00","slug":"first-civil-application-will-be-on-car-bras","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2016\/03\/07\/first-civil-application-will-be-on-car-bras\/","title":{"rendered":"First Civil Application will be on Car Bras"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/a>
A car bra<\/i><\/div>\n

Researchers at Iowa State University claim to have developed a flexible skin that absorbs radar<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Iowa State University engineers have developed a new flexible, stretchable and tunable “meta-skin” that uses rows of small, liquid-metal devices to cloak an object from the sharp eyes of radar.<\/span>

<\/span>The meta-skin takes its name from metamaterials, which are composites that have properties not found in nature and that can manipulate electromagnetic waves. By stretching and flexing the polymer meta-skin, it can be tuned to reduce the reflection of a wide range of radar frequencies.<\/span>

<\/span>The journal Scientific Reports recently reported the discovery online. Lead authors from Iowa State’s department of electrical and computer engineering are Liang Dong, associate professor; and Jiming Song, professor. Co-authors are Iowa State graduate students Siming Yang, Peng Liu and Qiugu Wang; and former Iowa State undergraduate Mingda Yang. The National Science Foundation and the China Scholarship Council have partially supported the project.<\/span>

<\/span>“It is believed that the present meta-skin technology will find many applications in electromagnetic frequency tuning, shielding and scattering suppression,” the engineers wrote in their paper.<\/span>

<\/span>Dong has a background in fabricating micro and nanoscale devices and working with liquids and polymers; Song has expertise in looking for new applications of electromagnetic waves.<\/span>

<\/span>Working together, they were hoping to prove an idea: that electromagnetic waves – perhaps even the shorter wavelengths of visible light – can be suppressed with flexible, tunable liquid-metal technologies.<\/span>

<\/span>What they came up with are rows of split ring resonators embedded inside layers of silicone sheets. The electric resonators are filled with galinstan, a metal alloy that’s liquid at room temperature and less toxic than other liquid metals such as mercury.<\/span>

<\/span>Those resonators are small rings with an outer radius of 2.5 millimeters and a thickness of half a millimeter. They have a 1 millimeter gap, essentially creating a small, curved segment of liquid wire.<\/span>

<\/span>The rings create electric inductors and the gaps create electric capacitors. Together they create a resonator that can trap and suppress radar waves at a certain frequency. Stretching the meta-skin changes the size of the liquid metal rings inside and changes the frequency the devices suppress.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Galinstan is the metal in modern “Mercury” thermometers.<\/p>\n

If this works, I expect to see covers on cars to absorb the radar frequencies used by speed radars.<\/p>\n

Because these radars operate over a fairly narrow bands, it’s not a particularly demanding application, and radar absorbent car bras has been a kind of holy grail in the industry.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A car bra Researchers at Iowa State University claim to have developed a flexible skin that absorbs radar: Iowa State University engineers have developed a new flexible, stretchable and tunable “meta-skin” that uses rows of small, liquid-metal devices to cloak an object from the sharp eyes of radar.The meta-skin takes its name from metamaterials, which …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1005,1025,1035],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-181824","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-business","category-technology","category-transportation"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/181824"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=181824"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/181824\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=181824"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=181824"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=181824"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}