Winner of the FEKO Student Competition Announced

HAMPTON, Va. - Nov. 15, 2013 - PRLog -- Chenchen's research was motivated by significant concerns in the radar community about the rapidly growing number of wind farms.  These concerns arose from the time-varying radar clutter caused by wind turbines that can interfere with radar detection and tracking operations.  Chenchen pointed out in his entry that it is important to understand the dynamic radar signatures from wind turbines in order to devise mitigation approaches.

His supervisor, Dr Hao Ling, Professor of Electrical Engineering and holder of the L. B. (Preach) Meaders Professorship in Engineering, receives the supervisor prize.

In his presentation entitled "Dynamic Radar Signatures of Wind Turbines – Simulation and Measurement", he gives a thorough description of his work involving FEKO.  In his studies so far he has investigated the dynamic backscattering of a single small wind turbine.  His approach was to use FEKO's Physical Optics solver to simulate a spinning wind turbine and to verify the results through in situ measurements of the small wind turbine with a commercially available radar module. He performed post-processing on the simulated field results to present the dynamic signatures by means of sinograms, spectograms and ISAR images, clearly explaining what can be observed from each of these diagrams.  He also combined ISAR snapshots to create a composite radar image of the turbine.

This year's FEKO Student Competition (http://www.feko.info/about-us/News/feko-student-competiti...) was dominated by entries from American universities.  Although students from other countries submitted engaging entries, three students studying at the University of Texas at Austin (http://www.engr.utexas.edu/) and The Ohio State University (http://electroscience.osu.edu/) made a clean sweep of the prizes.

In second place and receiving a certificate of achievement and a gift voucher is Ezdeen Elghannai from The ElectroScience Laboratory at The Ohio State University.  Ezdeen is pursuing his PhD with Prof. Roberto G. Rojas.

Ezdeen's entry "Systematic Design of Dual-Band Antenna for Wireless Applications using the Theory of Characteristic Modes", describes the design of a compact antenna for a universal serial bus (USB) dongle.  He inspects the different characteristic modes of a planar monopole antenna and loads the antenna so that the preferred mode resonates in the required frequency bands.

Ming Chen, also from the ElectroScience Laboratory at The Ohio State University where he is pursuing his PhD with Dr Chi-Chih Chen, claimed the third prize with his entry "Characterization of Pedestrian Electromagnetic Scattering Features at 76–77 GHz".  The motivation for his research lies in the high number of pedestrian collisions and fatalities in road traffic accidents across the globe.  This creates a demand for an effective pedestrian and bicyclist safety system.  Passive systems can minimise the injury to pedestrians when hitting vehicles, but as Ming points out, active systems can help to avoid accidents completely.  The collision avoidance system that he describes involves detecting and tracking moving pedestrians and cyclists in the vicinity of a motor vehicle and issuing warnings to the driver.

A close contender from outside the United States was David Vidal from UPC BarcelonaTech in Spain with his entry on the design of wireless power transfer antennas.  Other entries included projects on antenna design, analysis and/or placement for applications ranging from 4G mobile communications to radio astronomy.

“We are very pleased with the quality of entries we have received this year, in our 11^th Competition and we are committed to supporting engineering education worldwide,” says Gronum Smith, Director & Marketing Team Leader at EMSS.