A modified Taguchi method for the design of broadband spiral cavity absorbers

The goal of the work described was to replace the more common multilayer flat stack absorber with a single piece tapered (SPT) absorber. The SPT absorber has been shown to increase spiral antenna gain, reduce the absorber complexity, and improve the absorber reliability. The design of the SPT absorber (in a spiral antenna) was optimized to yield maximum gain improvement over a ´baseline´ spiral antenna that contained a multilayer flat stack cavity absorber. The design optimization was accomplished with Taguchi´s fractional factorial method. The Taguchi method was modified in this work with the development of a frequency dependent level graph, which allows for the accurate prediction and design of a particular frequency response for the spiral cavity absorber.<>