Selection of Core shell Material based Electromagnetic Wave Absorbers in 2 to18 GHz using TOPSIS and VIKOR Ranking Methods

Abstract

Electromagnetic (EM) wave has become an integral part of this electronics dominated era with extensive application in wireless communication, health care, and military applications. This has led to the development of EM wave absorbers for camouflaging the military warheads from the enemy radar tracking systems. The development of these absorbers requires considerable resources viz. time, energy, raw materials and cost. This creates a need for selection of a better absorber from the existing ones rather than the development of a new one to save the valuable resources. The judicious selection of an efficient microwave absorber requires ranking the existing absorbers based on selection criteria. For the first time, an attempt has been made to apply the concept of multi-criteria decisionmaking methods viz. VIKOR and TOPSIS in ranking the microwave absorbers. Core-shell materials provides enhanced EM wave attenuation owing to their hierarchical composite structure which provides a better approach to tune the dielectric and magnetic properties of the composite for obtaining good impedance matching resulting into enhanced absorption. In the present work, magnitude of minimum reflection co-efficient value, absorber thickness, deviation from the central frequency (i.e. 10 GHz) and -10 dB bandwidth have been selected as the criteria for judiciously selecting suitable core-shell based EM wave absorbers in 2-18 GHz. The selected criterion has been assigned distinct weights using Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP). The AHP derived weights have been employed in TOPSIS and VIKOR analysis for the absorbers ranking and selection.