Non-uniform and Partial Coating of an Aircraft for Achievement of the Minimum Radar Cross Section with the Minimum Weight of Absorbent

In this paper, the reduction of radar cross section of an airplane using overall and partial coverage of fuselage with absorbing material is studied. Specifically, various coverage strategies are tested to achieve minimum radar cross section and minimum mass of the absorbing material. This is important because the weight of absorbent material is usually great, around 13 Kg per square meter, even for a small thickness of 3mm. Therefore, it is extremely important to find effective strategies for covering the fuselage. Using the moment method and ray tracing method in the CST software package, the monostatic and bistatic RCS of an airplane with partial coverage of RAM are calculated. It is shown how partial coverage of the fuselage can affect the RCS. For instance, the head-front radar cross section of the studied airplane without any RAM coverage was found to be at 1.925 GHz. When only the wings are covered with RAM, the cross section is reduced to . When the body (without wings) is covered, the average mono-static radar cross section is reduced to . When all parts are covered with RAM, the average mono-static radar cross section is further reduced to . Furthermore, the effects of partial coverage of the wings are studied.