SAFASNAV

The SAFASNAV project is proposed by a consortium comprising DCNS, Telecom ParisTech, ONERA and SART. The goal is the development of structural materials and multilayer thin coatings that reduce the structures and superstructures electromagnetic reflectivity of civilian and / or military ships. This project is an extension of the results obtained during the previous SAFAS project. It consists of replacing the dielectric layers and metallic grids of the SAFAS absorbent structure (metamaterial) by specific materials appropriate to the naval environment. Thus, this work has two objectives: firstly to incorporate metamaterials in naval structural composite structures and secondly to develop coating metamaterials suitable for these naval applications. In addition to significant advances for military applications, the results of the SAFAS project clearly showed potential applications in the civil sector of the antenna and also the absorbent material. The level of TRL reached at the end of the project was that of a validation in a laboratory environment, that is to say, a TRL = 4. Further developments proposed here aim a TRL = 5/6. They are intimately related to the application and justify the entry of DCNS in the consortium for the development of electromagnetic absorbents for naval application in the context of this Astrid-maturation project. Combining the skills and results of SAFAS with the needs in terms of naval defence, but also the expertise in the field of composite materials and marine environment, offers rich prospects in valorisation and increase in maturity of the SAFAS results, as well as some potential applications (in the military, but to a large extent also in the civil sector). This is the challenge of SAFASNAV that move from laboratory mock-up validating a concept to the walls of functionalized naval structures, designed and implemented in an established industrial process. The innovative field of this project is based on the very special properties of self-complementary surfaces that have a theoretically unlimited operating bandwidth and that allow, when associated with one or more other high impedance surfaces, to produce thin absorbent materials without any lossy dielectric or magnetic material. A first purpose of the study is to integrate these multilayer absorbent materials directly in multilayer structural materials used to construct the superstructures of ships. The second purpose is to make coating materials used to reduce the reflectivity of single or multiple metal superstructures. Applications concern the stealth ship (SER) but also all civil and/or military intra-system and inter-system EMC applications (antennas decoupling, radiation patterns correction, effectiveness of shielding ...). The technologies developed should also be able to find their applications in the field of renewable energy (On/Off shore wind power).