Metamaterials Market by Device Type (Antennas, Superlens, Cloaking Devices, Absorbers), Metamaterial Type (Electromagnetic, Terahertz, Photonic, Tunable, Frequency Selective Surface, Non-Linear), Application & Geography: The value of metamaterials market is expected to reach $643 Million by 2025, at an estimated CAGR of 41.25% from 2015 to 2025.

Metamaterials are a class of smart materials that are intrinsically able to control and manipulate light, sound, and other phenomena. Their prime design characteristic of metamaterials – the characteristic that enables their various functionalities is that they are fabricated as a composite with the constituent materials tightly coupled enough that a metamaterial element can be treated as if it were a molecule, but of a purely artificial material.

Application of Metamaterials

The application for metamaterials that gets the most attention in the press is their ability to serve as invisibility cloaks for military aircraft. However, this futuristic application disguises the fact that metamaterials are already in use in antennas with many other applications rapidly emerging including optics, medicine, aerospace, infrastructure monitoring, military, earthquake monitoring, etc.

Another fast growing segment for metamaterials is the medical instrumentation sector. Research andDevelopment is going on to develop many innovative products which will enable and help doctors to serve and treat patients in a more easy and effective manner. Research is being carried out at St. Petersburg Laboratory in order to inculcate MRI scanning with metamaterials so as to increase its capabilities and offer better images with a higher resolution. The team is working on ways to provide sub-wavelength resolution for MRI using metamaterials. However, a lot needs to be done for the commercialization of these prototypes which are extremely large currently and barely fit inside a conventional MRI scanner.

Aerospace and defense segment holds the key for an exponential growth of the metamaterials market as many metamaterial based applications are expected to emerge out for this segment such as cloaking devices, radomes, and antennas. Although these are in the development stage and applications like cloaking are still almost a decade away, the R&D activities by the U.S. Department of defense (DOD) and federal agencies like DARPA along with the major U.S. universities such as Caltech, to develop the aforementioned devices on a large scale arefuelling up the activities in these segments. Invisibility cloaks will enable the U.S. military to turn the concept of ‘invisible army’ into a reality. The DOD has also phased out many projects through Small Business Innovation Research/Small Business Technology Transfer (SBIR/SBTT) program to innovate and develop more applications based on metamaterials for the aerospace and defense segment.

Some of the practical applications of metamaterials, which may probably be among the first ones to commercialize, are satellite user terminals, dynamic cellular base station antennas, collision avoidance radar systems, advanced medical devices, and imaging systems.

The analysis identifies the revenue generation potential over the next eight years for metamaterials. This analysis includes a discussion of the commercial implications of the latest technological trends, and how new designs and performance improvements are likely to expand the addressable markets for metamaterials. For example, look at the emergence of photonic metamaterials, tunable metamaterials, FSS selective surface based metamaterials, etc. Focus is also on how end-user markets for shape memory materials are changing.

The analysis will provide valuable insight into metamaterials markets that will benefit marketing and business development executives from various parts of the supply chain, including raw material suppliers, chemical and coatings companies, specialized firms and OEMs, as well as investors with an interest in the smart materials business.

Telecommunication applications will be the biggest contributor to the metamaterials market with the commercialization of antennas, an integral component in smartphones, routers, and satellite communication equipment. The use of metamaterials by companies like Rayspan, Kymeta, and Evolv and others in their products will make this segment the biggest contributor to the metamaterials market.