Time: 2:00 - 3:00pm Venue: QMUL campus: ITL Top Floor Larger Meeting Room
Hosted by the Antennas and Electromagnetics research group
Title: META-ATOMS AND METAMATERIALS FOR PERFORMANCE ENHANCEMENT OF ANTENNAS
Speaker: Professor Raj Mittra, University of Central Florida, USA
Abstract:
There has been an enormous research effort into artificially synthesized materials, aka ‘metamaterials’ that have novel and unusual material properties, and find suitable uses in many microwave and antenna applications, including performance enhancement of legacy antennas. In an attempt to produce a formalism that classifies these properties we introduce the concept of meta-atoms (MTAs), that are ‘meso’ scale particles, and have typical sizes much less than the wavelength at which the antenna will be operating. They could therefore be assembled to form synthetic materials of some predefined properties required for a particular application. A project entitled “Synthesizing 3D Metamaterials (MTMs) for RF, Microwave and THz Applications,” has been established in UK to study and classify these meta-atoms and produce structures that can be manufactured with Additive Manufacturing (AM) techniques, such as 3 D printing. This talk will focus on the topic of artificial synthesis of materials and present some real-world examples of their practical implementation. Unlike many of the previous works on MTMs, the focus of our work is on developing materials utilizing materials which operate away from the resonance range of the particles. Hence, they are not narrowband, dispersive, or lossy, as some of the early versions of the MTMs, e.g., Double-negative (DNG) or Zero-index (ZI) types, were reputed to be; and, consequently, they find wider range of applications in modern antenna design problems, as we will demonstrate via a number of illustrative examples.
Biography: Raj Mittra is a Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science department of the University of Central Florida in Orlando, FL., where he is the Director of the Electromagnetic Communication Laboratory. Prior to joining the University of Central Florida, he worked at Penn State as a Professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering from 1996 through June, 2015. He was a Professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Illinois in Urbana Champaign from 1957 through 1996, when he moved to the Penn State University. Currently, he also holds the position of Hi-Ci Professor at King Abdulaziz University in Saudi Arabia.
He is a Life Fellow of the IEEE, a Past-President of AP-S, and he has served as the Editor of the Transactions of the Antennas and Propagation Society. He won the Guggenheim Fellowship Award in 1965, the IEEE Centennial Medal in 1984, and the IEEE Millennium medal in 2000. Other honors include the IEEE/AP-S Distinguished Achievement Award in 2002, the Chen-To Tai Education Award in 2004 and the IEEE Electromagnetics Award in 2006, and the IEEE James H. Mulligan Award in 2011.
Recently he founded the e-Journal FERMAT (www.e-fermat.org) and has been serving as the co-editor-in-chief of the same. Dr. Mittra is a Principal Scientist and President of RM Associates, a consulting company founded in 1980, which provides services to industrial and governmental organizations, both in the U.S. and abroad.