Tungsten Oxide on the Fifth-Generation Fighters

The fifth-generation jet fighter is the most advanced generation of fighters in the world. It is fully maneuvered with low detectability technology and has high maneuverability, advanced avionics system, highly integrated computer network, excellent battlefield situational awareness and information fusion capabilities.The fifth-generation fighters currently in service are only the US F-22, F-35, Russia's T-57 and China's Chengdu J-20.

The most important need of the fifth-generation fighters is "stealth", which is how to deceive the radar tracking. The entire fighter body must possess the ability to absorb radar waves, so the coating material of the fighter is very important.

So now it comes to the stealth ability of the jet fighters. We must mention a material - the radar absorbing material. As the name implies, a absorbing material is a type of material that absorbs or substantially reduces the energy of electromagnetic waves that are projected onto its surface, thereby reducing the interference of electromagnetic waves. In engineering applications, in addition to requiring high absorption of electromagnetic waves in a wide frequency band, it is also required to have high temperature resistance, moisture resistance and high corrosion resistance. What’s more, the radar absorbing material used in aerospace must be a composite of a variety of materials, which may include nanomaterials, metal fiber materials, conductive polymers, and circuit-simulated absorbing materials, which have different characteristics.

tungsten oxide is one type of radar absorbing material that has applied on the stealth coating of the fifth-generation fighters. When the thickness of the tungsten oxide nanowire absorption layer is 1.5 mm, the optimal absorption performance is obtained at 16.7 GHz. The reflection loss reaches -40.5dB, which indicates that the tungsten oxide nanowire is an excellent radar absorbing material. It can be applied in the field of electromagnetic shielding technology and combat stealth technology, and can improve the compatibility of electromagnetic equipment and strengthen the protection of information technology. It can be used to the health of the person who operates electromagnetic radiation equipment.

What’s more, there is also a kind of radar absorbing coating material called chiral absorbing material, which is the focus of attention. In the in-depth study of tungsten oxide, scientists found that a single layer of tungsten selenide consisting of tungsten oxide and selenium is a very special chiral material. The phonon of this material collectively vibrates in the atomic crystal. Naturally, The ground is rotated in a certain direction. This property is called chirality. Similar to human's left and right hands mirroring but not identical to each other, such chiral materials can reduce the reflection of incident electromagnetic waves and absorb electromagnetic waves. Compared with general absorbing materials, chiral materials have the advantages of high absorbing frequency and absorption frequency bandwidth, and can improve the absorbing characteristics by adjusting the parameters of the gyro. It has great potential in improving absorbing performance and expanding absorbing bandwidth, and is expected to become a new generation of fighter absorbing materials in the future.

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