Design Optimization of Radar Absorbing Materials Using Particle Swarm Optimization

Microwave absorbers have numerous applications in the modern-day military and civil industries. This paper presents the performance of the Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithm to obtain optimal designs for multilayer microwave absorber over different frequency ranges. The goal of this optimization is to make decision about number of layers, selection of suitable combination of materials from a predefined database, thereby minimizing the overall reflection coefficient and designing a low weight electromagnetic absorber, which absorbs the maximum amount of incident electromagnetic energy. Microwave absorbers or radar absorbing materials (RAM) performance is studied by varying thickness and number of layers. For each different configuration obtained with PSO, simulated results are presented. The best results obtained using PSO are compared with those obtained using another optimization technique, genetic algorithm and also compared with the results computed using standard RCS computation software.