Final Activity Report Summary - 4M (Optimal Design and Fabrication of Electromagnetic Metamaterials for Millimeter and Microwave Applications)
Wireless communication systems must continue to improve in performance, while becoming smaller in size and power consumption and cheaper to produce. Concurrently, cost, size and performance expectations become more and more stringent, necessitating advanced system architectures, novel materials and versatile design optimisation procedures. A generalised material design procedure which could possibly be linked to the practical fabrication of these new designs has not been proposed. As a result, radio frequency (RF) technologies are still mostly designed around properties of available materials, since certain desirable property combinations are simply unavailable. Designers can only choose from what is listed in their handbook, so their creativity is limited to the clever use of these existing materials.
In this project, a material synthesis effort for the development of novel metamaterials for microwave and millimetre wave antennas (4M materials) was proposed with two major objectives:
1. to develop a versatile design methodology and
2. to develop an automated dry powder deposition (DPD) technology.
These 4M metamaterials were created from conventional substances, using powerful topology optimisation methods to engineer the property tensors and optimise application-specific figures of merit of antennas, such as broadband operation and miniaturisation. They were fabricated using sophisticated fabrication techniques such as DPD, suitable for multi-material textured composites that spatially varied in all three dimensions.
The combination of powerful optimal design techniques using approximation techniques and surrogate models, along with their practical realisation using automated DPD for specific applications, served as a general example for a new approach in the creation of designed magneto-dielectric composites, useful for other functional materials. The new functionality of metamaterials was expected to enable new technology for several microwave and millimetre wave applications. This would in turn lead to cheaper and much more efficient configurations for the much smaller and network-centric future systems.
In this project, a material synthesis effort for the development of novel metamaterials for microwave and millimetre wave antennas (4M materials) was proposed with two major objectives:
1. to develop a versatile design methodology and
2. to develop an automated dry powder deposition (DPD) technology.
These 4M metamaterials were created from conventional substances, using powerful topology optimisation methods to engineer the property tensors and optimise application-specific figures of merit of antennas, such as broadband operation and miniaturisation. They were fabricated using sophisticated fabrication techniques such as DPD, suitable for multi-material textured composites that spatially varied in all three dimensions.
The combination of powerful optimal design techniques using approximation techniques and surrogate models, along with their practical realisation using automated DPD for specific applications, served as a general example for a new approach in the creation of designed magneto-dielectric composites, useful for other functional materials. The new functionality of metamaterials was expected to enable new technology for several microwave and millimetre wave applications. This would in turn lead to cheaper and much more efficient configurations for the much smaller and network-centric future systems.