Miniaturized Metamaterial Absorber Using Three-Dimensional Printed Stair-Like Jerusalem Cross

In this paper, we propose a metamaterial absorber using 3-D printing technology. To miniaturize the footprint size of a unit cell, we introduce a 3-D printed stair-like Jerusalem cross (JC) structure. It is demonstrated that the absorption frequency can be decreased by building up one and two stairs from the planar JC. In this paper, the unit cell footprint size of the three-stair JC is reduced by 41% compared with the unit cell footprint size of the planar JC. The proposed metamaterial absorber with 9×9 unit cells is fabricated using a 3-D printer. Poly lactic acid is used as a dielectric material for 3-D printing, and a conductive pattern is realized by applying the silver paste to the 3-D printed dielectric structure. The simulated and measured absorptivity are 99.9% and 99.8%, respectively, at 5.18 GHz. Due to the symmetric unit cell structure, the absorptivity does not change, although the incident polarization gets rotated.