The design and development of lightweight wideband microwave absorbers remains a burning issue for industrials and academic laboratories. Polymer composites (especially with an elastomeric matrix) are usually used as electromagnetic (EM) wave absorbers. These absorbers are thus constituted of a polymer matrix filled with conductive particles (carbon black, carbon nanotubes, graphene) or lossy magnetic particles (iron, ferromagnetic alloys, ferrites) depending on the frequency band that have to be addressed. However, this solution leads to quite heavy absorbers, especially at low frequencies, and is thus not compatible with aircraft applications. 

Owing to its high flexibility and its capacity to easily realize complex geometries, 3D printing appears today as an exciting shaping technique in different fields. Applications in the medical industry and design are now well developed, and other industrial fields, including microwave electronics, have recently become interested in this technology. Various 3D-printing techniques can now be used to shape polymers, metals and ceramics. Among them, Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM), due to its low cost, was widely used to realize microwave devices, such as antennas or filters. 

It was recently demonstrated that FDM can be used to shape polymer composites that act as microwave absorbers. In this talk, we will present several experimental demonstrations on thus use of 3D printed composites in the microwave absorption domains (microwave loads, honeycomb microwave absorbers, millimeter-wave absorbers…). The strong potential and the main limitations of this technique will be discussed as well as the need to develop new printable composites dedicated to these applications.