Microwave absorbers find a plethora of applications in the modern-day military and civil industries. This paper compares the performance of different variations of the Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithm to obtain optimal designs for multilayer microwave absorber over different frequency ranges, angles of incidence and polarizations. The goal of this optimization is to minimize maximum overall reflection coefficient of the absorber by choosing suitable layers of materials from a predefined database and simultaneously make the overall thickness the least practically possible. Numerical optimal results for each variation of the PSO are presented and the best results are compared with those existing in literature.

Linear array SAR (LASAR) has been attracting more and more attention for its capability of obtaining three dimensional (3D) resolutions. However, the low resolution in cross track (CT) direction limited by the length of its linear antenna array has become the bottleneck of its practical applications. To overcome this problem, we present a novel algorithm based on sparse reconstruction (SR) to improve the resolution in CT direction. First, it establishes a 1D real-valued sparse model for LASAR, which deals with the 3D image column by column along CT direction in each equi-range slice. This enables it to handle large scenes. Second, it employs the spatially variant apodization (SVA) to filter bases of the measurement matrix. As a result, the cross coherence gets suppressed as well, and it is helpful to improve the performance of sparse reconstruction algorithms (SRAs). Third, we propose the resolution enhancement ability (REA), which provides a new idea to evaluate how many times the resolution could be improved. Experimental results validate that when the signal to noise ratio (SNR) is 30 dB, LASAR could usually obtain 2 times of resolution improvement in CT direction, while the proposed method further improves the REA by a factor about 2.5. Moreover, the 3D surface terrain simulation shows a great improvement for the digital elevation map (DEM) in resolution enhancement.

This paper presents the design, simulation and measurements of wideband two-stage LNAs using commercially available discrete components and targeting Square Kilometre Array (SKA) focal-plane-array verification studies. The design optimization was implemented through simulations based on theoretical work that shows that low wide-band noise figures and power match are achievable by inner-stage component selection and device bias. In contrast to the conventional practice of having each stage of a discrete LNA matched to 50 Ω, the inner stage was designed with a mismatching capacitor between the two stages. The measured results are presented for 0.7-1.4 GHz and achieve noise figures below 0.4 dB, gain of at least 28 dB, mid-band input return loss of 7 dB, output P1dB of 18.3 dBm, input-referred IP3 of -15.47 dBm, and power consumption of 500 mW with a supply voltage of 5 V.

A novel range-instantaneous-Doppler (RID) algorithm of inverse synthetic aperture radar (ISAR) imaging based on adaptive Doppler spectrum extraction is proposed in this paper. Regarding maneuvering targets, such as military aircraft, the ISAR image is blurred on cross-range domain when the range-Doppler (RD) algorithm is applied. The RID imaging method is often used to resolve the Doppler ambiguity, but there are some scatterers that could be lost because the sliced time is fixed in traditional RID imaging. To the method proposed in this paper, the optimal Doppler spectrum of each range bin is extracted by gradient energy function (GEF) after time-frequency (TF) analysis, and then all of the optimal Doppler spectrums are combined to obtain a final 2-D RID image of the target. Compared with the traditional RID method, the novel algorithm can obtain image with better focused quality. The results obtained from simulated and field-measured data verify the superiority of the proposed algorithm.

A new class of incomplete Bessel polynomials is introduced, and its application to the solution of electromagnetic problems regarding transient wave radiation phenomena in truncated spherical structures. The definition of said special functions is introduced, and the relevant analytical properties are derived. The definition is such that the interrelationships between the incomplete polynomials parallel, as far as is feasible, those for canonical Bessel polynomials.

Spatial resolution represents akey performance aspect in electrical capacitance volume tomography (ECVT). Factors affecting the resolution include the ``soft-field'' nature of ECVT, the number of capacitance channels used, the ill-conditioned nature of the imaging reconstruction problem, and the signal-to-noise ratio of the measurement apparatus. In this study, the effect of choosing different numbers of capacitance plates on the performance of ECVT is investigated. Specifically, two ECVT sensors with 12 and 24 capacitance channels but covering equal volumes of a cylinder are used to examine the resulting impact on the image resolution.

We report the results of a high-output power unbalanced tripler at 225 GHz, in which a pair of discrete Schottky varactor chips in parallel is adopted. Considering the present situation of domestic processing technology, the advantage of unbalanced structure is that it could provide bias to the diodes without a on-chip capacitor, which is essential in the balanced tripler scheme. The whole circuits are built on a 50 um-thick quartz substrate, and the novel field-circuit method is applied to the design process that enables us to calculate the impact of the parastics. The measured results indicate that the output power is more than 7 dBm in 215~228 GHz, and the output power is 12.3 dBm at 224 GHz when driven with 23.8 dBm of input power at room temperature. In general, this tripler has important practical value.

For microwave imaging systems that utilize antennas with spatially separated feeds and apertures, arrival time correction based on the antenna aperture location is one of the fundamental steps in radar data processing. The estimates of the antenna aperture time and the corresponding average velocity in the material in contact with the antenna are expected to have a significant impact on the quality of the reconstructed image. In this paper, we propose antenna aperture and average velocity estimation by least-squares regression analysis of the first-breaks. The results indicate that the proposed method is able to process either the reflection data or the transmission data measured by antennas with different structures. Compared to those readily identifiable characteristics in the signal, the first-break is less influenced by waveform distortion and is able to provide more consistent reference. Differences in the images of test objects are also noted.

Novel eagle shape microstrip wearable antennas (element and array) are presented. The single- and two-element antenna arrays are designed and fabricated on a Roger RT/Duroid 5880 substrate with dielectric constant of 2.2, thickness of 1.5748 mm, and tan δ = 0.001. The measured results show that a reduction in mutual coupling of 36 dB is achieved at the first band (1.68-2.65) GHz and 22.1 dB over the second band (6.5-8.86) GHz due to introducing electromagnetic bandgap (EBG) structures. EBG structure has an eagle-like shape with more gaps. By increasing the number of EBG cells and varying the gap distance between cells to certain limit, the mutual coupling reduction is improved. Also, a size reduction of 80% is achieved. The microstrip array was simulated by CST simulator version 2014 and fabricated by proto laser machine with precision 25 μm. The specific absorption rate (SAR) investigation is carried out on CST2014 Simulator. Maximum SAR value is 1.953 W/Kg which indicates that the eagle-shaped microstrip wearable antennas are safe for human. The antennas can be used in the official or RFID applications.

To achieve broadband microwave absorption, a three-layer structure is designed and manufactured. It involves a resistive frequency selective surface (FSS) sandwiched between two layers of magnetic sheets. The measurement results reveal that this structure exhibits -13 dB reflectivity in the frequency range of 7.9-18 GHz while the thickness is only 1.7 mm. The reflectivity bandwidth at the level of -10 dB is 11.4 GHz which is much wider than that of magnetic sheets with non-resistive FSS or the magnetic sheets without FSS. The effect of resistive FSS on the performance of the multilayered absorber is discussed in detail. It is concluded that an embedded resistive double loops FSS can result in a secondary resonance peak which obviously broadens the reflectivity bandwidth of the magnetic sheets.

Analytical and numerical approaches are presented for modeling the interaction of azimuthally symmetric fields with omnidirectional metasurfaces, based on the use of locally homogenized equivalent sheet impedances. Radially uniform metasurfaces on layered dielectric media are described in terms of a spectral impedance dyadic, thus allowing for the derivation of the field excited by omnidirectional sources through a simple transmission-line model. In a first approximation, the effect of circular edges in laterally truncated structures is taken into account through an efficient physicaloptics method. Then, truncated and radially non-uniform homogenized layered structures are treated numerically with the method of moments, by suitably extending a recently developed spectral-domain formulation. Numerical results are presented for planar radiating structures based on omnidirectional metasurfaces, comparing the radiation patterns obtained through the proposed homogenized models with those calculated by means of full-wave simulations. The discussion emphasizes the validity of the proposed approaches and their usefulness in the analysis of two-dimensional leaky-wave antennas based on printed omnidirectional metasurfaces.

In this paper, an improved wideband millimeter-wave 180° hybrid is proposed to apply to balanced mixers and multipliers. The proposed hybrid consists of a transition of standard waveguide to suspended coplanar waveguide (SCPW) and a transition of SCPW to suspended stripline. According to the inherent electromagnetic field characteristics of the two transitions, the proposed hybrid has merits of broadband power distribution and high isolation, which does not rely on resonant circuits. The measured insertion losses and isolation of two transitions at Ka-band are typically 1.4 dB and 25 dB, respectively. To verify the application of the proposed hybrid, A W-band single balanced mixer based on the hybrid has been designed and fabricated. The measured single-sideband (SSB) conversion losses of the fabricated mixer are less than 9.5 dB for the radio frequency (RF) range from 80 to 108 GHz. The presented hybrid has been proven to be efficient for the design of millimeter-wave balanced mixers and could be well applied in multipliers and other integrated circuits.

We propose a hybrid multimodal variational method (MVM) and finite element method (FEM) to the analysis of complex 2D discontinuities in circular waveguides. The finite element method characterizes waves in arbitrarily shaped discontinuities, and the total response of the circuit is obtained by applying the multimodal variational method. The proposed hybrid method is successfully applied to the full-wave analysis of discontinuities with great practical interest (i.e., circular, crossshaped, off-centered, ridged, multi-aperture irises, etc.), thus improving CPU time and memory storage against several full-wave finite element method based computer aided design (CAD) tools (i.e. HFSS High Frequency Structural Simulator).

An effective medium modeling technique is proposed to homogenize the periodic objects embedded in layered media. The homogenization is based on the same scattering coefficients. An integral equation based approach is adopted to solve the scattering problem of original structures. Our modeling results are compared with Maxwell-Garnett mixing formula and published results. Good agreements have been observed. Periodic metal patches embedding in layered dielectric structure is fabricated and measured to validate the modeling technique. The difference between experiment results and proposed modeling results is less than 3%.

Overhead power transmission line is influenced by the resistivity of earth return path. The topic is developed in literature by considering a homogeneous and isotropic earth, or verily the soil is more represented by several layers. The scope of this paper is to provide an equivalent homogeneous soil to the two layers stratified soil. The equivalent electromagnetic properties of the soil are calculated using an accurate minimization method. Numerical results presented in this paper, show the efficiency of the proposed model.

Studying of mutual coupling parameters between the antenna elements in an array environment has been considered as the subject of feature research. That is why, in this paper, we present a new Floquet modal analysis procedure for analyzing almost periodic structures. Accurate evaluation of the mutual coupling could be achieved by this analysis. It is shown how Floquet analysis can be exploited to study a finite array with arbitrary amplitude and linear phase distribution in both x-y directions including mutual coupling effects. Two different calculation methods of coupling coefficients between the array elements are presented, in spectral and spatial domains, to solve the suggested problem. For modeling the given structures, the moment method combined with Generalized Equivalent Circuit (MoM-GEC) is proposed. High gain in the running time and memory used is given using Floquet analysis. To validate this work, several examples are shown.

A planar, printed multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) antenna for slim mobile handset is presented. The dual-antenna system, comprises two symmetric antenna elements, is printed on a printed circuit board (PCB) of mobile phone. Each antenna element consists of coupled-fed loop antenna. The loop antenna is formed by a quarter wavelength (at 762 MHz) meandered loop strip with end terminal short-circuited to the ground plane. A Tshaped protruded ground is deliberately designed to enhance the impedance matching and decoupled the two closely deposed antenna elements (distance between antenna elements are 0.03λ at 762 MHz). The integrity of the T-shaped decoupling structure and coupled-fed loop antenna array covers LTE700 (0.747 GHz−0.787 GHz) and WWAN (1.7 GHz-3.04 GHz) based on -6 dB reflection coefficient and achieves isolation between elements well below -10 dB over all the operating bands. The application platform is LTE700, GSM1700, GMS1800, UMTS, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, LTE2300, and LTE2500 bands for the 2G/3G/4G mobile terminals. The effect of user proximity by considering the actual mobile environment is also studied in the form of total radiated power (TRP), specific absorption rate (SAR), diversity performances, and radiation performances. Finally, a prototype is fabricated and tested with network analyser. The measured results are found in good agreement with simulated ones.

This paper presents the design of a novel wideband gap coupled sectoral antenna for communication systems. The circular patch is placed in the aperture of four sectoral rings. The antenna parameters are optimized using various simulations to attain good return loss and corresponding resonant frequency. The antenna operates in X-band at 10.35 GHz showing wideband characteristics along with high directivity and reduced side lobe level to a good extent. The antenna has also been studied using fuzzy inference system (FIS). The return loss and analogous frequency obtained from simulated results and fuzzy system are compared and in good agreement. Design is extended to an array of nine elements mutually coupled to the active fed patch. The antenna is fabricated, and the simulated results are found to be in good agreement with experimentally measured ones. A bandwidth of 900 MHz at resonant frequency of 10.35 GHz with a directivity of 7.0 dBi and reduced side lobe level of -18.9 dB is therefore obtained.

In this work, we show how we can improve the image resolution capabilities of a Phase Conjugating (PC) lens as well as the angular resolution of Luneburg lens antennas by employing signal processing techniques, such as the Correlation Method (CM), the Minimum Residual Power Search Method (MRPSM), the sparse reconstruction method, and the Singular-Value-Decomposition (SVD)-based basis matrix method. In the first part, we apply these techniques for sub-wavelength imaging in the microwave regime by combining them with the well-known phase conjugation principle. We begin by considering a one-dimensional microwave sub-wavelength imaging problem handled by using three signal processing methods, and then we move on to two- or three-dimensional problems by using the SVD-based basis matrix method. Numerical simulation results show that we can enhance the resolution significantly by using these methods, even if the measurement plane is not located in the very near-field region of the source. We describe these proposed algorithms in detail and study their abilities to resolve at the sub-wavelength level. Next, we investigate the sparse reconstruction method for a normal Luneburg lens antenna, and the Correlation Method and the SVD-based basis matrix method for a flat-base Luneburg lens antenna to estimate the Direction-of-Arrival (DOA). Numerical simulation results show that the signal processing techniques are capable of enhancing the angular resolution of the Luneburg lens antenna, enabling the lens to locate multiple targets with different scattering cross-sections, and achieving higher angular resolution.

Invisibility has been a tantalizing concept for mankind over several centuries. With recent developments in metamaterial science and nanotechnology, the possibility of cloaking objects to incoming electromagnetic radiation has been escaping the realm of science fiction to become a technological reality. In this article, we review the state-of-the-art in the science of invisibility for electromagnetic waves, and examine the different available technical concepts and experimental investigations, focusing on the underlying physics and the basic scientific concepts. We discuss the available cloaking methods, including transformation optics, plasmonic and mantle cloaking, transmission-line networks, parallel-plate cloaking, anomalous resonance methods, hybrid methods and active schemes, and give our perspective on the subject and its future. We also draw a parallel with cloaking research for acoustic and elastodynamic waves, liquid waves, matter waves and thermal flux, demonstrating how ideas initiated in the field of electromagnetism have been able to open groundbreaking venues in a variety of other scientific fields. Finally, applications of cloaking to non-invasive sensing are discussed and reviewed.