Active Cloaking of a Non-Uniform Scatterer

An object illuminated by an electromagnetic wave can be actively cloaked using a surface conformal array of radiating sources to cancel out scattering. This method is promising as elementary antennas can be used as sources while its active nature can surpass passivity-based performance limitations. While this technique has been conceptually extended to accommodate complex geometries, experimental validation past simple uniform scatterers is lacking. To address this scarcity, the design and experimental demonstration of a low-profile, active cloak capable of concealing a complex, metallic, polygonal target is presented. This cloak is constructed with commercially available monopoles and enclosed within a parallel-plate waveguide-based apparatus to approximate a quasi-2D environment. Performance is then assessed when the target is illuminated at either frontal or oblique incidence by a 1.2 GHz cylindrical wave. Overall, the cloak reduces the target’s scattering cross-section by an average of 7.2 dB at frontal incidence and 8.6 dB at oblique incidence. These results demonstrate the feasibility of this kind of active cloaking for more complex scatterers containing flat surfaces and edges. Further analysis shows that the cloak possesses a functional bandwidth of 14% and can be reconfigured for single frequency operation over 0.8–1.8 GHz.