3D printed invisible cloak
Yup, this would make you invisible to microwaves. Comes in handy when you are out hunting wild microwave ovens.
Hehe, there is always a first step for everything. Imagine you can go inside all microwaves in the world and steal all the omelette! How handy is it!
Similar cloaking efforts are underway to make objects invisible to light and sound waves right now so soon we can become Harry Potter. (Wishful thinking)
This has been around for a few years now, (I went to a lecture on it about 2-3 years back) the principal of this is that you make a solid structure that bends the wave and directs it around you. The problem is it typically has a very narrow functional bandwidth (ie it may redirect a little bit of “blue” but nothing else). Also there is nothing cloak like about it, it is typically a ridged cylinder.
Edit after posting I realized how off topic the rest of my post was.
Things not mentioned but can be inferred from this article:
As you can use one of these 3D printed cloaks to shield something from the 10 Ghz range of frequencies, such devices may be very useful for antenna design if they can work reasonably well with a hole in them (which appears to be the case). Think of using a sphere of this design with a cylindrical hole from the centre to one outside edge. Inside is a small high gain antenna, which now suffers much less noise from rear and side interference (as these are blocked). Also the same goes for extremely sensitive radio amplifier circuitry shielding (think spacecraft like Plank, which try and measure the background radiation), where a standard Farady cage simply isn’t enough.
@Stuart_Young from an enclosed antenna point of view I don’t think that it is really an improvement, you could just put the antenna in a metal can, not only will it shield it from the noise (there is always leakage in these metamaterials) but if properly designed it will increase the gain of the antenna. it is a solution looking for a problem currently.