Cross‐polarization reduction of microstrip antenna using microwave absorbers

In this article, a metamaterial inspired microwave absorber is used to reduce the cross‐polarization (XP) level of the radiated wave in microstrip antenna (MSA). A microwave absorber unit‐cell has been analyzed and implemented to reduce the cross polarization (XP) level in a single element and a 2 × 2 microstrip patch array antennas. The antennas have been designed on a FR‐4 substrate of thickness 0.8 mm at 10.1 GHz center frequency. The 2 × 2 patch array antenna with and without the absorbers have been experimentally verified for the S11 parameter, the radiation pattern, and the XP suppression in H‐plane and a good comparison has been found.     

Design and measurement‐based characterization of a K‐band metalens for wideband oblique‐incident spherical‐plane wave conversion

In this article, a wideband spherical‐plane wave conversion metalens (WSPCM) working in the K‐band is designed. The WSPCM consists of metamaterial elements with gradient transmission phases, which can transform the oblique‐incident spherical wave to the plane wave propagating along the direction from the source to the center of the metalens. First, a five‐layer metamaterial element with gradient transmission phase is designed using the Computer Simulation Technology software. Then, a metamaterial wedge consists of eight metamaterial elements with 30° phase gradient (that can deflect the incident plane wave by 30°) is designed to verify the phase modulation characteristic of the metamaterial element. Afterwards, a metalens is designed according to the digitized phase distribution of the dielectric lens. Finally, the electric field distribution of the emitted wave at different frequencies and different source locations (ie, oblique‐incident angles) is studied. The design is validated through simulations and measurements.     

An analytical representation of conformal mapping for genus-zero implicit surfaces and its application to surface shape similarity assessment

This paper develops an analytical representation of conformal mapping for genus-zero implicit surfaces based on algebraic polynomial functions, and its application to surface shape similarity assessment. Generally, the conformal mapping often works as a tool of planar or spherical parameterization for triangle mesh surfaces. It is further exploited for implicit surface matching in this study. The method begins with discretizing one implicit surface by triangle mesh, where a discrete harmonic energy model related to both the mesh and the other implicit surface is established based on a polynomial-function mapping. Then both the zero-center constraint and the landmark constraints are added to the model to ensure the uniqueness of mapping result with the Möbius transformation. By searching optimal polynomial coefficients with the Lagrange–Newton method, the analytical representation of conformal mapping is obtained, which reveals all global and continuous one-to-one correspondent point pairs between two implicit surfaces. Finally, a shape similarity assessment index for (two) implicit surfaces is proposed through calculating the differences of all the shape index values among those corresponding points. The proposed analytical representation method of conformal mapping and the shape assessment index are both verified by the simulation cases for the closed genus-zero implicit surfaces. Experimental results show that the method is effective for genus-zero implicit surfaces, which will offer a new way for object retrieval and manufactured surface inspection.     

Optically transparent and single‐band metamaterial absorber based on indium‐tin‐oxide

This article proposes and experimentally demonstrates an optically transparent and polarization‐insensitive metamaterial absorber in the terahertz (THz) frequencies. The absorber is formed by indium‐tin‐oxide (ITO) resistive films, providing efficient absorption with absorptivity of 94.1% at the peak absorption frequency of 120.8 GHz. We systematically investigate the surface current distribution and the power loss analysis, and explain the architecture of the absorber. Moreover, the absorber exhibits unique absorption properties at resonant frequencies, that is, featuring single‐band or dual‐band operation by changing the surface resistance of the ITO patterns. In addition, the experimental demonstration and measurement results are in good agreement with the simulated results. Most importantly, the fabricated absorber exhibits an optical transparency above 70% over the entire visible waveband, thereby enabling a wide range of applications such as optically transparent THz absorbers and detectors.     

A photoexcited switchable tristate terahertz metamaterial absorber

In this study, we propose a photoexcited tristate terahertz metamaterial absorber which can switch between single‐/single‐/dual‐band absorption modes in terahertz regime. The unit cell of the absorber incorporates two kinds of photosensitive semiconductor materials filled the gaps between four asymmetric right‐angle wires and a cross wire. By applying different wavelengths of pump light on the absorber, two kinds of semiconductor materials can be excited to realize single‐/single‐/dual‐band switchable absorption characteristics. The distributions of electric fields and surface currents at absorption peak frequencies under three absorption states are demonstrated to elucidate the switchable mechanism of the proposed absorber. Moreover, the absorption performance of the proposed tristate absorber is discussed under different polarization and incidence angles. The proposed structure is expected to be applied in the terahertz devices such as tunable absorbers, modulators, filters, and switches.     

Effect and experiment of curvature radius of 3‐D printed conformal load‐bearing antenna array on EM performance

Prototypes of a special conformal load‐bearing antenna array (CLAA) which has nondevelopable surface, are designed, fabricated, and tested, and the effect of the substrate curvature radius on its EM performance is also researched in this work. A novel three‐dimensional (3‐D) printing technology and fabrication equipment based on micro‐droplet spraying and metal laser sintering are proposed to create patch array and divider network on a non‐developable curved rigid substrate. In order to compare with conventional technology (such as chemical etching), a planar CLAA prototype with two patches, operating frequency at 5GHz, is designed and fabricated by two different technologies, the surface roughness, fabrication tolerance, and EM performance are tested and compared. Finally, a spherical CLAA prototype with eight patches, operating frequency at 13GHz, is designed and fabricated by the novel 3D printing, measured EM performance demonstrate the applicability of additive manufacturing for this special CLAA.     

Wideband bow‐tie antenna with increased gain and directivity by using high impedance surface

Metamaterial surfaces offer a wide range of advantages in terms of antenna design. One such metamaterial is designed to capture the benefits of both high‐impedance surfaces as well as artificial magnetic surfaces. The confluence of both these properties delivers an added advantage to planar antennas by delivering high gain and directivity simultaneously. Bidirectional radiation pattern has been transformed to a directional radiation pattern by placing the metamaterial as substrate beneath the antipodal bowtie antenna. In addition, zero separation between the antenna and metasurface ensures low profile. The proposed design has been verified both by simulation and measurement which have shown an improvement on gain of 3.2 dBi with an almost steady gain response inside the resonating band of the antenna which lies between 12 and 16 GHz.     

A spherical representation for recognition of free-form surfaces

Introduces a new surface representation for recognizing curved objects. The authors approach begins by representing an object by a discrete mesh of points built from range data or from a geometric model of the object. The mesh is computed from the data by deforming a standard shaped mesh, for example, an ellipsoid, until it fits the surface of the object. The authors define local regularity constraints that the mesh must satisfy. The authors then define a canonical mapping between the mesh describing the object and a standard spherical mesh. A surface curvature index that is pose-invariant is stored at every node of the mesh. The authors use this object representation for recognition by comparing the spherical model of a reference object with the model extracted from a new observed scene. The authors show how the similarity between reference model and observed data can be evaluated and they show how the pose of the reference object in the observed scene can be easily computed using this representation. The authors present results on real range images which show that this approach to modelling and recognizing 3D objects has three main advantages: (1) it is applicable to complex curved surfaces that cannot be handled by conventional techniques; (2) it reduces the recognition problem to the computation of similarity between spherical distributions; in particular, the recognition algorithm does not require any combinatorial search; and (3) even though it is based on a spherical mapping, the approach can handle occlusions and partial views     

Extracting impervious surfaces from medium spatial resolution multispectral and hyperspectral imagery: a comparison

Remote sensing estimation of impervious surfaces is significant in monitoring urban development and determining the overall environmental health of a watershed, and has therefore recently attracted increasing interest. The main objective of this study was to develop a general approach to estimating and mapping impervious surfaces by using medium spatial resolution satellite imagery. We have applied spectral mixture analysis (SMA) to Earth Observing 1 (EO‐1) Advanced Land Imager (ALI) (multispectral) and Hyperion (hyperspectral) imagery in Marion County, Indiana, USA, to calculate the fraction images of vegetation, soil, high albedo and low albedo. The effectiveness of the two images was compared according to three criteria: (1) high‐quality fraction images for the urban landscape, (2) relatively low error, and (3) the distinction among typical land use and land cover (LULC) types in the study area. The fraction images were further used to estimate and map impervious surfaces. The accuracy of the estimated impervious surface was checked against Digital Orthophoto Quarter Quadrangle (DOQQ) images. The results indicate that both ALI and Hyperion sensors were effective in deriving the fraction images with SMA and in computing impervious surfaces. The SMA results for both ALI and Hyperion images using four endmembers were excellent, with a mean root mean square error (RMSE) less than 0.04 in both cases. The ALI‐derived impervious surface image yielded an RMSE of 15.3%, and the Hyperion‐derived impervious surface image yielded an RMSE of 17.5%. However, the Hyperion image was more powerful in discerning low‐albedo surface materials, which has been a major obstacle for impervious surface estimation with medium resolution multispectral images. A sensitivity analysis of the mapping of impervious surfaces using different scenarios of Hyperion band combinations suggests that the improvement in mapping accuracy in general and the better ability in discriminating low‐albedo surfaces came mainly from additional bands in the mid‐infrared region.     

Comparative Visualization of Molecular Surfaces Using Deformable Models

The comparison of molecular surface attributes is of interest for computer aided drug design and the analysis of biochemical simulations. Due to the non‐rigid nature of molecular surfaces, partial shape matching is feasible for mapping two surfaces onto each other. We present a novel technique to obtain a mapping relation between two surfaces using a deformable model approach. This relation is used for pair‐wise comparison of local surface attributes (e.g. electrostatic potential). We combine the difference value as well as the comparability as derived from the local matching quality in a 3D molecular visualization by mapping them to color. A 2D matrix shows the global dissimilarity in an overview of different data sets in an ensemble. We apply our visualizations to simulation results provided by collaborators from the field of biochemistry to evaluate the effectiveness of our results.     

Projection Mapping on Arbitrary Cubic Cell Complexes

This work presents a new representation used as a rendering primitive of surfaces. Our representation is defined by an arbitrary cubic cell complex: a projection‐based parameterization domain for surfaces where geometry and appearance information are stored as tile textures. This representation is used by our ray casting rendering algorithm called projection mapping, which can be used for rendering geometry and appearance details of surfaces from arbitrary viewpoints. The projection mapping algorithm uses a fragment shader based on linear and binary searches of the relief mapping algorithm. Instead of traditionally rendering the surface, only front faces of our rendering primitive (our arbitrary cubic cell complex) are drawn, and geometry and appearance details of the surface are rendered back by using projection mapping. Alternatively, another method is proposed for mapping appearance information on complex surfaces using our arbitrary cubic cell complexes. In this case, instead of reconstructing the geometry as in projection mapping, the original mesh of a surface is directly passed to the rendering algorithm. This algorithm is applied in the texture mapping of cultural heritage sculptures.     

Millimeter‐wave antenna with wide‐scan angle radiation characteristics for MIMO applications

A three‐element quasi Yagi‐Uda antenna array with printed metamaterial surface generated from the array of uniplanar capacitively loaded loop (CLL) unit‐cells printed on the substrate operating in the band 25‐30 GHz is proposed. The metamaterial surface is configured to provide a high‐refractive index to tilt the electromagnetic (EM) beam from the two dipole antennas placed opposite to each other. The metamaterial region focuses the rays from the dipole antenna and hence increases the gain of the individual antennas by about 5 dBi. The antenna elements are printed on a 10 mil substrate with a center to center separation of about 0.5 λ ₀ at 28 GHz. The three‐element antenna covers 25‐30 GHz band with measured return loss of 10 dB and isolation greater than 15 dB between all the three ports. The measured gain of about 11 dBi is achieved for all the antenna elements. The three antenna elements radiate in three different directions and cover a radiation scan angle of 64°.     

Compact ultrathin conformal metamaterial dual‐band absorber for curved surfaces

A compact, ultrathin conformal metamaterial dual‐band absorber for curved surfaces has been presented in this article. The absorber unit cell composed of circular and split ring resonators which are connected with plus‐shaped structure. The proposed absorber unit cell is compact in size (0.22λ_o × 0.22λ_o) and as well as ultrathin thickness (0.006λ_o), where λ_o is the wavelength at 5.8 GHz. The designed absorber gives two absorption tips at 5.8 and 7.7 GHz with more than 90% absorptivity. The full width at half maximum bandwidths are 220 MHz (5.67‐5.89 GHz) and 250 MHz (7.58‐7.83 GHz). The proposed conformal absorber is sensitive to the polarization angle and has a stable absorptivity over a wide range of incident electromagnetic wave. The parametric analysis and equivalent transmission line model have been investigated. The surface current and electric field distribution also discussed for understanding the absorption mechanism. To analyze the performance of proposed absorber on the curved surfaces, it is wrapped on the different radius of cylindrical surface and measured the absorptivity. Simulated and measured results have good agreement between them.     

Metamaterial inspired CPW‐fed compact antenna for ultrawide band applications

A small size, planar and co‐planar waveguide fed metamaterial inspired antenna is proposed for ultra‐wideband (UWB) application. The main radiating element consists of three split‐ring resonators (SRR) and placed along one axis. Moreover, coplanar waveguide (CPW)‐fed line along with modified ground plane is used to improve the impedance matching. The physical size of proposed antenna is 25(W) × 22 (L) × 1.6 (H) mm³. The CPW‐fed metamaterial inspired antenna provides bandwidth of 10.4 GHz from 3.1 to 13.5 GHz based on the 3:1 (voltage standing wave ratio [VSWR] <2). Over the range of UWB frequency, peak realized gain varies from 2.5 to 4 dBi. The proposed antenna provides omnidrectional radiation patterns. Further, fidelity factor of the proposed antenna is also calculated and measured. The calculated fidelity factor is suitable for UWB applications. Finally, prototype of the antenna is developed and tested using network analyzer. The simulated and measured results are in good agreement.     

基于Lagrange-Newton 方法的零亏格网格的参数化

考虑零亏格网格的球面参数化问题,即将给定的零亏格多边形曲面一一映射到单位球面上.已有一些方法解决该问题.针对应用PHT 样条进行曲面拟合的需要,对于给定的零亏格网格,提供了一个改进的算法.这种参数化方法主要包含两部分:一是限制在球面约束条件下,极小化离散调和能量;二是使用Lagrange-Newton 方法求解带约束的优化问题.几个例子演示了参数化的结果,并且说明了应用该参数化结果,能够用PHT 样条曲面更好地拟合给定网格曲面.     

Computing global visibility maps for regions on the boundaries of polyhedra using Minkowski sums

A global visibility map is a spherical image built to describe the complete set of global visible view directions for a surface. In this paper, we consider the computation of global visibility maps for regions on the boundary of a polyhedron. Both the self-occlusions introduced by a region and the global occlusions introduced by the rest of the surfaces on the boundary of the polyhedron are considered for computing a global visibility map. We show that the occluded view directions introduced between a pair of polyhedral surfaces can be computed from the spherical projection of the Minkowski sum of one surface and the reflection of the other. A suitable subset of the Minkowski sum, which shares the identical spherical projection with the complete Minkowski sum, is constructed to obtain the spherical images representing global occlusions. Our method has been successfully tested on many CAD models. It extends the previous methods for computing global visibility maps using convex decomposition, and it exhibits a better performance.     

Feedback method from inspection to process plan based on feature mapping for aircraft structural parts

The feedback from results of computer aided inspection is used by process planners (though a manual process) to improve machining processes to achieve desired quality. Mapping from inspection features to machining features is a practical method to automate this process. In NC machining of aircraft structural parts, composite machining features, surface joining and complex topological adjacency between free-from surfaces make this kind of mapping (one-to-many mapping mostly) much more complicated. In this research, a new feature mapping based feedback method from inspection to process plan is proposed. The geometry of inspection features are categorized into three kinds of basic inspection elements: Axis, Plane, and Surface. Then, the one-to-many mapping is simplified into one-to-one mapping. The correspondence relationships between basic inspection elements and machining features are abstract as mapping rules to obtain the associations between the basic inspection elements and candidate machining features. Through geometric reasoning, the basic inspection elements are mapped into machining features. Then, the measure data as feedback can be transferred to process planner for improving machining process. The optimized machining process will be stored in knowledge base for reusing. A case study is presented in this paper to demonstrate the proposed method. A prototype feature-based on-line inspection system has been developed and applied for machining aircraft structural parts in a large aircraft manufacturer.     

Metamaterial loads used in microstrip antenna for circular polarization: Review

The metamaterial elements and structures have been noticed for obtaining circular polarization (CP) while developing various procedures. In this paper, we have mentioned some of these cases and compared the metamaterial loads effect on antenna current distribution. We have classified them into four categories. The first case covers patch antenna based on composite right/left‐handed method, where the metamaterial has been used for changing the current distribution in the loop form. The second case has been achieved by radome and metasurface. In the third model, the interaction between feed and metamaterial load has been considered and the last case has been made by the metamaterial load with truncated structure. The metamaterial loading has been modeled based on Nicolson‐Ross or transmission/reflection techniques for extracting the permittivity and permeability. While the microstrip slot antennas are attractive for wider bandwidth, the truncated structure can change the current for achieving CP. Here, we have studied the antenna for wireless and WiMAX applications.     

点模型曲面的调和映射参数化

利用调和映射的平面和球面中值性质，提出了确定点模型曲面参数化映射中有关权因子的两种新方法，设计了能够达到内在变形较小的相应参数化方法，并将参数化方法应用于点模型曲面上的纹理映射．实验和统计结果表明，文中方法是比较有效的点模型曲面的参数化方法．     

Visibility Silhouettes for Semi‐Analytic Spherical Integration

At each shade point, the spherical visibility function encodes occlusion from surrounding geometry, in all directions. Computing this function is difficult and point‐sampling approaches, such as ray‐tracing or hardware shadow mapping, are traditionally used to efficiently approximate it. We propose a semi‐analytic solution to the problem where the spherical silhouette of the visibility is computed using a search over a 4D dual mesh of the scene. Once computed, we are able to semi‐analytically integrate visibility‐masked spherical functions along the visibility silhouette, instead of over the entire hemisphere. In this way, we avoid the artefacts that arise from using point‐sampling strategies to integrate visibility, a function with unbounded frequency content. We demonstrate our approach on several applications, including direct illumination from realistic lighting and computation of pre‐computed radiance transfer data. Additionally, we present a new frequency‐space method for exactly computing all‐frequency shadows on diffuse surfaces. Our results match ground truth computed using importance‐sampled stratified Monte Carlo ray‐tracing, with comparable performance on scenes with low‐to‐moderate geometric complexity.