Enhancing Time-Domain Shielding Effectiveness of Cables Using Metal-Coated Aramid-Fiber Composites

The shielding performance of cables with less weight has become a pivotal strategy for ensuring the device stability and reliability, especially in harsh operational conditions. This article develops nickel-coated aramid fiber (Ni@AF) composites as a novel cable shielding material and designs shielding layer structures using a proposed simulation-driven framework, through which excellent cable shielding performance is achieved. Specifically, the Ni@AF composite possesses an average shielding effectiveness (SE) of up to 65.4 dB at 4–12.4 GHz, and the cables using Ni@AF are predicted to show 87.51% increase in the time domain shielding effectiveness (TDSE) and 46% reduction in weight, as compared to the cables using conventional metal materials. Moreover, the TDSE of the proposed cable structure remains highly stable, with a variation less than 3.08% across different pulse widths, and also displays extremely low sensitivity to the polarization patterns and incident angles, with difference variation less than 17.38% and 17.72% respectively. The practicality of the proposed shielded cable structure, including its incident condition insensitivity and adaptability in high-power electromagnetic pulse environments, has been confirmed by measurements and real-world scenario simulations.