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Senior engineering technology-electronics majors Armando del Angel and Juan H. Nava’s research work may just one day improve the antennas in your laptop computer or mobile phone. Del Angel and Nava, both students in the Engineering Department’s Senior Design Project course, developed a way to study antenna signal behavior. Nava’s undertaking was to create a software and hardware interface for an antenna to be controlled remotely from a personal computer. Del Angel designed and built a chamber to house the antenna, called an anechoic chamber, where outside radiation cannot penetrate the walls and radiation from the antenna that hits the inside walls is absorbed and does not reflect back. Both students have been working on their respective projects since the beginning of the Fall 2007 semester. They work under the guidance of Assistant Professors of Engineering Fabio Urbani and Yong Zhou. The aim of the research is to study metamaterials, which are synthetic composite materials that, for a given situation, possess better properties than the constituent substances. In particular, the endeavor studies the behavior of these materials when exposed to microwave radiation. In an interview with The Collegian, Urbani showed a computer plot of a microstrip antenna’s energy in space and provided a brief overview of this research project. “This is a program that allows us to simulate circuits,” he said. “When you simulate [a microstrip antenna], you get a plot that represents all of the energy that radiates from the antenna that is distributed in space, which means that if you receive a signal from [the top] direction you will get the maximum signal strength. “This is a numerical simulation; this is not something that is real. The next step is to make this real, so [make] it, and then we go and test it in the anechoic chamber. So, what they did was to design and build an anechoic chamber to emulate free space.” Urbani said the Senior Design Project courses have taken on a more research-oriented trend since Guillermo Weber, chairman of the Engineering Department, took the helm of the course two years ago. Del Angel took some time to present his finished product. “What this thing does is that it absorbs the radiation that we transmit to the antenna, so the antenna will only receive what we send to it,” he said. “Everything that bounces off the antenna will be absorbed by this material so that it won’t get back to the antenna. We’re [emulating] free space. The outer insulation is from aluminum and it’s to prevent the radiation from the outside getting inside. You don’t have a cell phone signal or Wi-Fi inside, for example.” Nava wrote a computer program to control the antenna, in addition to a hardware interface that communicates between the antenna’s original controls and a computer. He said that he designed the interface in such a way that the computer can transmit multiple commands to be executed simultaneously. “If I want to move, for example, an elevation and azimuth, I can do the movement at the same time,” Nava said. “Otherwise, I would need to wait until one movement reached the position and then the other one is going to start.” Del Angel said Nava developed this interface to make adjustments in the position of the antenna easier. “The antenna came with a manual control, which is just a box where you start moving and it says by which degree and the position of the antenna,” Del Angel said. “What we wanted is to make a program so that we would put the position, like by how many degrees on this side and how many degrees on this side and it would automatically move it to that point.” Urbani said that if the project yields good results, the lab data will be submitted to academic journals for publication. The lab’s work is funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation.
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