199 research outputs found

    Beam scanning by liquid-crystal biasing in a modified SIW structure

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    A fixed-frequency beam-scanning 1D antenna based on Liquid Crystals (LCs) is designed for application in 2D scanning with lateral alignment. The 2D array environment imposes full decoupling of adjacent 1D antennas, which often conflicts with the LC requirement of DC biasing: the proposed design accommodates both. The LC medium is placed inside a Substrate Integrated Waveguide (SIW) modified to work as a Groove Gap Waveguide, with radiating slots etched on the upper broad wall, that radiates as a Leaky-Wave Antenna (LWA). This allows effective application of the DC bias voltage needed for tuning the LCs. At the same time, the RF field remains laterally confined, enabling the possibility to lay several antennas in parallel and achieve 2D beam scanning. The design is validated by simulation employing the actual properties of a commercial LC medium

    Complementary RFID tag antennas

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    This thesis is mainly concerned with the investigation of a systematic approach to selecting tag antennas whose electromagnetic properties are compatible with the platforms on which they are supported and the immediate environment in which they are to be operated. The work is divided into three parts. The first two explore the design and optimisation of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tag antennas: firstly, in this section, behaviour of an electric dipole is explored. Secondly, a novel dual band Slot Patch Antenna (SPA) antenna is designed and developed, which employs various resonant slots to perturb the tuning and impedance of a conventional slotline. The third investigates its operation within a roll cage. Complementary dipole and Slot Patch Antennas (SPA) are investigated to obtain a range of options on antenna configurations that, at certain selected frequency bands, give optimum interaction with the antenna support material. This requires that the regions of Perfect Electric Conductor (PEC) and free space dielectric substrate in both antennas be interchanged. The antennas are truncated of the otherwise infinite perfect electric conductor and dielectric substrate. The radar cross sections (RCS) are predicted under various load conditions and orientations when the models are illuminated with plane wave. The convergence of this method has been found to depend on the load conditions and the substrate thickness and permittivity. The RCS at boresight is found to depend on the radiating elements. The effects of various possible mounting platforms are predicted. The feasibility of reading tags through wire meshes such as those on a roll cage is investigated. The cages, of various mesh sizes, exhibit transmission responses characterised by frequency spacing of approximately half the first resonant frequency. The insertion loss is found to decrease with increasing mesh size. Also, the standing waves inside the cage exhibit nulls whose voltage standing wave ratio (v.s.w.r.) decreases with increasing mesh sizes. The distance, or range, over which the tag surveillance operates, is approximated in proportion to the amplitude of the standing wave at the position of the tag with peaks and nulls occurring at every half wavelength. The effects on the read range of either electromagnetic absorber or scatterer packing the space with the roll cage are also investigated

    1-D broadside-radiating leaky-wave antenna based on a numerically synthesized impedance surface

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    A newly-developed deterministic numerical technique for the automated design of metasurface antennas is applied here for the first time to the design of a 1-D printed Leaky-Wave Antenna (LWA) for broadside radiation. The surface impedance synthesis process does not require any a priori knowledge on the impedance pattern, and starts from a mask constraint on the desired far-field and practical bounds on the unit cell impedance values. The designed reactance surface for broadside radiation exhibits a non conventional patterning; this highlights the merit of using an automated design process for a design well known to be challenging for analytical methods. The antenna is physically implemented with an array of metal strips with varying gap widths and simulation results show very good agreement with the predicted performance

    Deep learning processing and interpretation of ground penetrating radar data using a numerical equivalent of a real GPR transducer

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    Ground-Penetrating Radar (GPR) is a popular non-destructive electromagnetic (EM) technique that is used in diverse applications across different fields, most commonly geophysics and civil engineering. One of the most common applications of GPR is concrete scanning, where it is used to detect structural elements and support the assessment of its condition. However, in any GPR application, the data have no resemblance to the characteristics of targets of interest and a means of extracting information from the data regarding the targets is required. Interpreting the GPR data, to infer key properties of the subsurface and to locate the targets is a difficult and challenging task and is highly dependent on the processing of the data and the experience of the user. Traditional processing techniques have some drawbacks, which can lead to misinterpretations of the data in addition to the interpretation being subjective to the user. Machine learning (ML) has proven its ability to solve a variety of problems and map complex relationships and in recent years, is becoming an increasingly attractive option for solving GPR and other EM problems regarding processing and interpretation. Numerical modelling has been extensively used to understand the EM wave propagation and assist in the interpretation of GPR responses. If ML is combined with numerical modelling, efficient solutions to GPR problems can be acquired. This research focuses on developing a numerical equivalent of a commercial GPR transducer and utilising this model to produce realistic synthetic training data sets for deep learning applications. The numerical model is based on the high-frequency 2000 MHz "palm" antenna from Geophysical Survey Systems, Inc. (GSSI). This GPR system is mainly used for concrete scanning, where the targets are located close to the surface. Unknown antenna parameters were found using global optimisation by minimising the mismatch between synthetic and real responses. A very good match was achieved, demonstrating that the model can accurately replicate the behaviour of the real antenna which was further validated using a number of laboratory experiments. Real data were acquired using the GSSI transducer over a sandbox and reinforced concrete slabs and the same scenarios were replicated in the simulations using the antenna model, showing excellent agreement. The developed antenna model was used to generate synthetic data, which are similar to the true data, for two deep learning applications, trained entirely using synthetic data. The first deep learning application suggested in the present thesis is background response and properties prediction. Two coupled neural networks are trained to predict the background response given as input total GPR responses, perform background removal and subsequently use the predicted background response to predict its dielectric properties. The suggested scheme not only performs the background removal processing step, but also enables the velocity calculation of the EM wave propagating in a medium using the predicted permittivity value. The ML algorithm is evaluated using a number of synthetic and measured data demonstrating its efficiency and higher accuracy compared to traditional methods. Predicting a permittivity value per A-scan included in a B-scan results in a permittivity distribution, which is used along with background removal to perform reverse-time migration (RTM). The proposed RTM scheme proved to be superior when compared with the commonly used RTM schemes. The second application was a deep learning-based forward solver, which is used as part of a full-waveform inversion (FWI) framework. A neural network is trained to predict entire B-scans given certain model parameters as input for reinforced concrete slab scenarios. The network makes predictions in real time, reducing by orders of magnitude the computational time of FWI, which is usually coupled with an FDTD forward solver. Therefore, making FWI applicable to commercial computers without the need of high-performance computing (HPC). The results clearly illustrate that ML schemes can be implemented to solve GPR problems and highlight the importance of having a digital representation of a real transducer in the simulations

    Mars delivery service - development of the electro-mechanical systems of the Sample Fetch Rover for the Mars Sample Return Campaign

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    This thesis describes the development of the Sample Fetch Rover (SFR), studied for Mars Sample Return (MSR), an international campaign carried out in cooperation between the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the European Space Agency (ESA). The focus of this document is the design of the electro-mechanical systems of the rover. After placing this work into the general context of robotic planetary exploration and summarising the state of the art for what concerns Mars rovers, the architecture of the Mars Sample Return Campaign is presented. A complete overview of the current SFR architecture is provided, touching upon all the main subsystems of the spacecraft. For each area, it is discussed what are the design drivers, the chosen solutions and whether they use heritage technology (in particular from the ExoMars Rover) or new developments. This research focuses on two topics of particular interest, due to their relevance for the mission and the novelty of their design: locomotion and sample acquisition, which are discussed in depth. The early SFR locomotion concepts are summarised, covering the initial trade-offs and discarded designs for higher traverse performance. Once a consolidated architecture was reached, the locomotion subsystem was developed further, defining the details of the suspension, actuators, deployment mechanisms and wheels. This technology is presented here in detail, including some key analysis and test results that support the design and demonstrate how it responds to the mission requirements. Another major electro-mechanical system developed as part of this work is the one dedicated to sample tube acquisition. The concept of operations of this machinery was defined to be robust against the unknown conditions that characterise the mission. The design process led to a highly automated robotic system which is described here in its main components: vision system, robotic arm and tube storage

    The Fifteenth Marcel Grossmann Meeting

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    The three volumes of the proceedings of MG15 give a broad view of all aspects of gravitational physics and astrophysics, from mathematical issues to recent observations and experiments. The scientific program of the meeting included 40 morning plenary talks over 6 days, 5 evening popular talks and nearly 100 parallel sessions on 71 topics spread over 4 afternoons. These proceedings are a representative sample of the very many oral and poster presentations made at the meeting.Part A contains plenary and review articles and the contributions from some parallel sessions, while Parts B and C consist of those from the remaining parallel sessions. The contents range from the mathematical foundations of classical and quantum gravitational theories including recent developments in string theory, to precision tests of general relativity including progress towards the detection of gravitational waves, and from supernova cosmology to relativistic astrophysics, including topics such as gamma ray bursts, black hole physics both in our galaxy and in active galactic nuclei in other galaxies, and neutron star, pulsar and white dwarf astrophysics. Parallel sessions touch on dark matter, neutrinos, X-ray sources, astrophysical black holes, neutron stars, white dwarfs, binary systems, radiative transfer, accretion disks, quasars, gamma ray bursts, supernovas, alternative gravitational theories, perturbations of collapsed objects, analog models, black hole thermodynamics, numerical relativity, gravitational lensing, large scale structure, observational cosmology, early universe models and cosmic microwave background anisotropies, inhomogeneous cosmology, inflation, global structure, singularities, chaos, Einstein-Maxwell systems, wormholes, exact solutions of Einstein's equations, gravitational waves, gravitational wave detectors and data analysis, precision gravitational measurements, quantum gravity and loop quantum gravity, quantum cosmology, strings and branes, self-gravitating systems, gamma ray astronomy, cosmic rays and the history of general relativity

    Antennas and Propagation

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    This Special Issue gathers topics of utmost interest in the field of antennas and propagation, such as: new directions and challenges in antenna design and propagation; innovative antenna technologies for space applications; metamaterial, metasurface and other periodic structures; antennas for 5G; electromagnetic field measurements and remote sensing applications

    INTER-ENG 2020

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    These proceedings contain research papers that were accepted for presentation at the 14th International Conference Inter-Eng 2020 ,Interdisciplinarity in Engineering, which was held on 8–9 October 2020, in Târgu Mureș, Romania. It is a leading international professional and scientific forum for engineers and scientists to present research works, contributions, and recent developments, as well as current practices in engineering, which is falling into a tradition of important scientific events occurring at Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology in the George Emil Palade University of Medicine, Pharmacy Science, and Technology of Târgu Mures, Romania. The Inter-Eng conference started from the observation that in the 21st century, the era of high technology, without new approaches in research, we cannot speak of a harmonious society. The theme of the conference, proposing a new approach related to Industry 4.0, was the development of a new generation of smart factories based on the manufacturing and assembly process digitalization, related to advanced manufacturing technology, lean manufacturing, sustainable manufacturing, additive manufacturing, and manufacturing tools and equipment. The conference slogan was “Europe’s future is digital: a broad vision of the Industry 4.0 concept beyond direct manufacturing in the company”

    Software model with verification of the imaging chamber in microwave tomography

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    Микроталасна томографија је метода за снимање објекта путем микроталаса. Након мерења објекта системом антена у комори решава се инверзни проблем нумеричком симулацијом и оптимизацијом. У овом раду се решава проблем верности моделовања антенског система у симулацији. Избегавањем апроксимација у моделовању антенског система, добија се вернији софтверски модел. Ради постизавања тог циља  жичана квадратна спирална антена је одабрана за коришћење у комори за снимање. Употреба предложене антене у микроталасној томографији је новитет. Реализован је софтверски симулациони модел коморе са предложеном антеном.  У симулацијама је извршено поређење са другим антенама често коришћеним у литератури за дату сврху. Израђен је прототип коморе са предложеним антенама. Извршена су мерења и поређења са предложеним моделом, како би се потврдила веродостојсност модела.Mikrotalasna tomografija je metoda za snimanje objekta putem mikrotalasa. Nakon merenja objekta sistemom antena u komori rešava se inverzni problem numeričkom simulacijom i optimizacijom. U ovom radu se rešava problem vernosti modelovanja antenskog sistema u simulaciji. Izbegavanjem aproksimacija u modelovanju antenskog sistema, dobija se verniji softverski model. Radi postizavanja tog cilja  žičana kvadratna spiralna antena je odabrana za korišćenje u komori za snimanje. Upotreba predložene antene u mikrotalasnoj tomografiji je novitet. Realizovan je softverski simulacioni model komore sa predloženom antenom.  U simulacijama je izvršeno poređenje sa drugim antenama često korišćenim u literaturi za datu svrhu. Izrađen je prototip komore sa predloženim antenama. Izvršena su merenja i poređenja sa predloženim modelom, kako bi se potvrdila verodostojsnost modela.Microwave tomography is method of object imaging by means of microwaves. After object measurement by system of antennas in chamber inverse problem is solved by numeric simulation and optimization. This thesis focuses on problem of trueness in modeling antenna system in simulation. Avoding approximations while modeling antenna system yield better trueness of software model. To achieve this target wire square spiral antenna is utilized in imaging chamber. Usage of proposed antenna in microwave tomography is novelty. Software simulation model of chamber with proposed antenna is designed and evaluated. Comparison with other antennas often used in literature for this purpose is done in simulation. Chamber with antennas is realized at the prototype level. Measurement and comparison with proposed model are done in order to verify its trueness
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