G. Kiziltas; "Design and Fabrication of Artificially Engineered..."

DESIGN AND FABRICATION OF ARTIFICIALLY ENGINEERED MATERIAL COMPOSITES FOR ELECTROMAGNETIC SYSTEMS

Güllü Kızıltaş

While the number of advanced devices designed for the wireless communication industry increases significantly, their sophistication in terms of technology, level of integration, and miniaturization increases as well. Concurrently, cost, size, and performance expectations become more and more stringent, necessitating advanced system architectures, “new” materials and versatile design optimization procedures. The capability to manipulate the distribution of properties within the dielectric materials in an automated way is critical to enable dramatic improvements in antenna performance, and to overcome traditional design trade-offs between efficiency, bandwidth, and miniaturization. These concepts have not been addressed earlier in the electromagnetic (EM) community due to a plethora of barriers that have made these concepts unfeasible in the past. In this research, the challenges of system design are addressed from an interdisciplinary engineering perspective, with a focus on using automated design tools (such as topology optimization) and artificially engineered composite materials. Specifically, a design framework was developed using the concepts of topology optimization, rigorous analysis models, high-contrast dielectric materials and sophisticated millimeter-and micro-scale fabrication of ceramics, polymers, and other materials to create “novel” EM devices. This allowed us, for the first time, to develop full three-dimensional volumetric material textures and printed conductor topologies to enhance the performance of various RF components such as filters and patch antennas. Design and fabrication technologies, presented in this research, based on basic capabilities of using engineered materials and systems, when applied correctly, will dramatically shift the face of multidisciplinary engineering design.

Dr. Gullu KIZILTAS completed her B. S. and M. S. degrees in Mechanical Engineering at the Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey, in 1995 and 1998, respectively. She was awarded a Doctoral Fellowship by the Mechanical Engineering Department at the University of Michigan in September 1998, when she joined the Computational Mechanics Laboratory. During her PhD, she worked on extending topology optimization design methods to high frequency electromagnetic applications and the design, analysis and characterization of artificially engineered materials for Radio Frequency (RF) applications. In May 2003, she completed her PhD degree in Mechanical Engineering at the University of Michigan. Currently she is a Post Doctoral Researcher at both the ElectroScience Laboratory at Ohio State University and the University of Michigan. Her current research interests are Finite Element Analysis (FEA) and design of complex engineering systems. She also coordinates with the Ceramic Research Group at the University of Michigan on the advanced fabrication of dielectric composites. The applications areas of her research focus are the design and fabrication of miniaturized mechanical, electromechanical and biomedical devices.