The purpose of this study is to prepare a resistive lossy material using conducting polymers for electromagnetic wave absorbers. This paper presents a conductive paste largely composed of poly(3,4-ethylenedioxythiophene):poly(styrenesulfonate) with a polyurethane binder. The various secondary compounds are added in small amounts to an aqueous blended solution in order to enhance the electrical and mechanical properties of the conductive thin film. The synthesized conductive paste is characterized through electrical, chemical, and morphological analyses. The electrical conductivity of the thin film is measured using a four-point probe and surface profiler. The chemical and morphological changes are studied in various experiments using a Raman microscope, X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy, a scanning electron microscope, and an atomic force microscope. In order to verify the applicability of the synthesized conductive paste, which is composed of 70 wt% PEDOT:PSS, 30 wt% polyurethane, and secondary additives (DMAE 0.4 wt%, A-187 0.5 wt%, DMSO 7 wt%, Dynol 604 0.1 wt%, PUR 40 2.5 wt%), the Salisbury screen absorber is fabricated and evaluated in the X-band. According to the results, the absorber resonates at 9.7 GHz, the reflection loss is −38.6 dB, and the 90% absorption bandwidth is 3.4 GHz (8.2 to 11.6 GHz). Through this experiment, the applicability of the PEDOT:PSS-based conductive paste is sufficiently verified and it is found that excellent radar-absorbing performance can be realized.

It is widely known that materials exposed to the severe low earth orbit (LEO) environment undergo degradations. For the evaluation of fiber Bragg grating (FBG) sensors in the LEO environment, the reflective spectrum change and the Bragg wavelength shift of FBG sensor were measured during aging cycles simulating the LEO environment. The LEO environment was simulated by high vacuum (~10^-5 Torr), ultraviolet (UV) radiation (<200nm wavelength), temperature cycling (-30°C~100°C), and atomic oxygen atmosphere (AO flux of 9.12×10¹⁴ atoms/cm²/s and kinetic energy of ~0.04 eV). FBG sensor arrays were embedded into the graphite/epoxy composite material. Through the aging cycles simulated for the LEO environment, the change in the reflective spectrums and the Bragg wavelengths from FBG sensors were investigated.