Pangolin?Inspired Stretchable, Microwave?Invisible Metascale

Microwave-invisible devices are emerging as a valuable technology in various applications, including soft robotics, shape-morphing structures, and textural camouflages, especially electronic countermeasures. Unfortunately, conventional microwave-absorbing metastructures bulk absorbers stretching confined, limiting their application deformable or special-shaped targets. To overcome such limitations, conceptually novel soft–rigid-connection strategy, inspired by the pangolin, is proposed. Pangolin-inspired metascale (PIMS), which kind of stretchable metamaterial consisting an electromagnetic dissipative scale (EMD-scale) elastomer, rationally designed. Such device exhibits robust capacity under interference 50% stretching. Besides, profiting from covering effect size-confined EMD-scale, out-of-plane indentation failure force PIMS at least 5 times larger than device. As proof concept, proposed conformally pasted on nondevelopable surfaces. For spherical dome surface, maximum radar cross-section (RCS) reduction 6.3 dB that device, while for saddle bandwidth 10 RCS increase 83%. In short, this work provides platform to develop stretchable, surface conformable functional devices.