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Design and Fabrication of Artifically Engineered
Material Composites for Electromagnetic Systems
While the number of advanced devices designed for the wireless
communication industry increases significantly, their sophistication
in terms of technology, level of integration, and miniaturization
increases as well. Concurrently, cost, size, and performance
expectations become more and more stringent, necessitating advanced
system architectures, 'new' materials and versatile design
optimization procedures. The capability to manipulate the distribution
of properties within the dielectric materials in an automated way is
critical to enable dramatic improvements in antenna performance, and
to overcome traditional design trade-offs between efficiency,
bandwidth, and miniaturization. These concepts have not been addressed
earlier in the electromagnetic (EM) community due to a plethora of
barriers that have made these concepts unfeasible in the past. In this
research, the challenges of system design are addressed from an
interdisciplinary engineering perspective, with a focus on using
automated design tools (such as topology optimization) and
artificially engineered composite materials. Specifically, a design
framework was developed using the concepts of topology optimization,
rigorous analysis models, high-contrast dielectric materials and
sophisticated millimeter-and micro-scale fabrication of ceramics,
polymers, and other materials to create 'novel' EM devices. This
allowed us, for the first time, to develop full three-dimensional
volumetric material textures and printed conductor topologies to
enhance the performance of various RF components such as filters and
patch antennas. Design and fabrication technologies, presented in this
research, based on basic capabilities of using engineered materials
and systems, when applied correctly, will dramatically shift the face
of multidisciplinary engineering design
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