Multilayered salt water with high optical transparency for EMI shielding applications

Electromagnetic interference (EMI) shielding for visual observation applications, such as windows utilized in military or aerospace, is important but difficult to realize due to conventional materials having difficulty in achieving sufficient transparency and EMI shielding simultaneously. In this paper, we present multilayered structures based on salt water for simultaneous highly optical transparency (OT) and EM shielding effectiveness (SE) performance. In the proposed structures, planar acrylic and glass were used as two types of clear substrates to hold salt water. The measured OT of both acrylic/salt water/acrylic and glass/salt water/glass structures was higher than 90% with a nearly uniform light transmission, which introduced a negligible impact on optical observation. Furthermore, both simulations and experimental results demonstrated that the SE of the multilayer structure was higher than 20 dB in the X-band from 7.5 to 8.5 GHz. Moreover, the SE was significantly enhanced by increasing the thickness of the salt water layer. Especially, both OT and SE of the multilayered structures were improved simultaneously by increasing the salinity of the salt water. These proposed structures demonstrate great potential in EMI shielding observation applications.