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Penn State Partners with Lockheed Martin to Develop Metamaterials
Metamaterial technology is set to transform the performance of spacecraft antennas by offering reduced weight and lower cost, according to researchers at Penn State who are partnering with a team from Lockheed Martin.
This breakthrough material can significantly improve the performance of spacecraft antennas because it can help make components smaller and/or more lightweight. “This is important in space-based applications and can also be less costly to manufacture,” says Professor Doug Werner, director of the Penn State Computational Electromagnetics and Antennas Research Lab.
He has been leading a team of students and researchers who have developed the design tools for this technology. Modifications enabled by metamaterials can either enhance performance, or they can lower the mass and thus lower the cost of putting an antenna into space. “Lighter antennas reduce the cost of boosting a satellite into space. And once it’s in orbit, weight is also a factor,” Werner says.
Metamaterials, simply put, are human-engineered materials that have exotic properties going beyond what are commonly found in nature. “Meta” is a Greek prefix meaning “beyond.” Metamaterials derive their unusual properties from structure rather than composition.
Lockheed Martin’s University Research Initiative (URI) Program funded this project, which produced a metamaterial used in a horn-shaped satellite antenna. Researchers at Lockheed Martin had already come up with a concept design for the antenna, but they needed a metamaterial lining with a broad operating bandwidth of at least an octave, that would prevent the power going into the antenna from dropping too much before it could be transmitted.
Lockheed Martin partnered with Penn State because they had the capability to custom-design and fabricate these metamaterials, according to Jeff Mucha, senior manager at Lockheed Martin. The company also wanted to reduce the weight of the antenna since anything going into space needs to be as light as possible. These antennas are for commercial applications: broadband devices, telecommunication systems, audio and video links, and other communication purposes.
The antennas are naturally lighter because they are filled with air inside and have a thin metamaterial liner, Werner says. He also says that the new metaliner design needed a refractive index (the measurement of how much electromagnetic waves bend when they pass through something) of between 0 and 1. Air’s refractive index is 1 and this number is higher for most other natural materials.
Penn State and Lockheed Martin have been working on this technology for the past three years. “We decided that the first year we were going to focus on applications for radio frequency antennas, where we thought we had a reasonable chance to succeed,” says Erik Lier, technical Fellow, Lockheed Martin Space Systems Co.
It’s one of the first examples of a real-world use for metamaterials research, according to Werner. “It’s considered to be the first commercially viable product of its kind and is one of the first practical implementations of electromagnetic metamaterials that improves a real-world device,” he says. Werner’s team is also researching making antennas entirely out of the circuit boards, which would weigh and cost even less.
Werner’s team will work with Theresa Mayer, Professor of Electrical Engineering at Penn State, focusing on optical metamaterials and nanostructures. Her team will move into Penn State’s Millennium Science Complex, slated to be completed by late Summer 2011. This state-of-the-art facility will feature interdisciplinary research between the Life Sciences and the Material Sciences faculty and students.
Penn State continues to refine its design process. “We have proven the concept already, and we are now working on a third-generation design,” Werner says. Penn State will continue to search for new ways to use this metamaterial technology. “We plan to seek out a broader range of other applications in the future,” he says.
