Portugal is developing a material based on graphene that can significantly reduce the visibility of drones and military aircraft to radar, an innovation that could position Europe in the race for stealth technology.
The project is led by GTechPlasma (source in Portuguese), a spin-off from the Plasma and Nuclear Fusion Institute at Instituto Superior Técnico in Lisbon, which has created a plasma-based system to produce customised, high-quality graphene materials.
"Right now, we are very focused on developing coatings for radar and electromagnetic radiation absorption," explains Bruno Soares Gonçalves, co-founder of GTechPlasma, in an interview with Euronews.
The material has been developed to absorb electromagnetic radiation, including radar waves, a key characteristic for stealth applications.
"The most obvious applications at the moment are in the defence sector, but there are many other areas where this type of material has potential for electromagnetic shielding, to reduce radiation. That is why we believe we have an extremely interesting material for radar-absorbing coatings," says the researcher from Instituto Superior Técnico, stressing that similar solutions are rare and tightly controlled at international level.
"At present, there is no other solution in Europe, and even worldwide only the United States has one. But the material that, for example, coats the F-35 is a material that cannot be exported. So we have a material ‘made in’ Portugal with strong application potential," says Bruno Soares Gonçalves.
Graphene is a sheet of carbon atoms just one atom thick, in this case produced from precursors such as ethyl alcohol or methane, using plasma technology.
Read the full article in Euronews.
