With the help of supercomputing power, researchers explore the health risks of wireless devices through virtual body models and advanced algorithms.
Dr. Yilmaz and his collegues at the Institue for Computational Engineering and Sciences use computer models and algorithms to study the heating effects of wireless devices. They are addressing the roadblocks that simulation-bsaed power absoption studies are facing. They have recently created AustinMan, shown above, a publicly available model that represents the human body with one-millimeter-cubed resolution. The model contains 30 types of tissues with unique electromagnetic properties and more than 100 million voxels (3-D versions of pixels) that interact with one another during virtual cellphone calls.
Professor Andrea Alù has received an NSF CAREER Award for his research on "Sensing, Imaging and Energy Applications of Metamaterial Cloaks." Dr. Alù's research focuses on the fundamental theoretical and experimental study of metamaterial covers, operating as cloaks to suppress the otherwise inevitable disturbance that near-field sensors, imagers and absorbers produce on their surroundings. These findings will be aimed at advancing near-field measurements and imaging techniques, and increasing the efficiency of green-energy devices. The project results may substantially improve biomedical measurements and the efficiency of absorbing semiconductor devices.
Dr. Hall wins DOE Grant on MEMS Seismometers
Working in collaboration with a local start-up, Silicon Audio, Professor Neal Hall is helping to develop high performance low-noise seismometers for the Department of Energy. The National Nuclear Security Administration uses miniature seismic sensors for monitoring nuclear explosions. Seismometer performance specifications are to be consistent with those obtainable by only an elite few products available today, but with orders of magnitude reduction in size, weight, power, and cost. The proposed innovation calls upon the combination of silicon microfabrication, advanced meso-scale fabrication and assembly, and the use of advanced photonics-based displacement/motion detection methods. The project will focus on addressing low frequency noise challenges, low power consumption, ultra-miniature size, and low cross axis sensitivity. Successful implementation will result in a commercial product roughly the size of a 9 volt battery and with the ability to immediately address some national security needs. Additional application areas include scientific instrumentation, sensors for oil and gas exploration, inertial navigation, and civil infrastructure monitoring.
UT-ECE professors Ali Yilmaz and John Pearce and their colleagues Professors Leszek Demkowicz and Robert van de Geijn at ICES and Dr. Victor Eijkhout at TACC have received a $1.4 million grant from the National Science Foundation for a project entitled “High-fidelity simulation of bioelectromagnetic (BIOEM) effects on the human body with petascale computers”.
The interdisciplinary team of researchers will attempt to significantly advance the state-of-the-art in BIOEM simulation by developing reliable, high-accuracy, and high-resolution finite- and boundary-element simulators that can effectively utilize petascale computational resources. The project aims to accurately model wave interactions with the human body at resolutions never before attempted, to quantify the heating effect of wireless devices on the human body and the electromagnetic effect of the human body on device performance, and to demonstrate that results from these simulations can be used to design safer and more efficient devices.
Dr. Neikirk wins Grant for Developing Wireless Sensor Nets for Monitoring the Health of Civil Infrastructure
Professor Dean Neikirk received a grant from the National Science Foundation to develop a new low-cost, wireless, unpowered resonant sensor net that can be used to monitor large areas in civil infrastructure systems. A critical new area of research relates to the electromagnetic coupling of individual elements in the net to produce collective, crystal-like behavior, allowing large area coverage with high sensitivity to damage.
The buildings, bridges, dams, and lifelines that comprise the civil infrastructure present unique challenges for sensor development due to their large size, unique designs, continuous exposure to the environment, infrequent inspections, and long design life. For most real-time health monitoring systems that attempt to address all these concerns, the costs associated with the installation, maintenance, and interpreting the data are prohibitive for the overwhelming majority of infrastructure systems in the US. In contrast, the proposed wireless sensor net should provide a cost-effective alternative to real-time health monitoring systems. The sensor net will greatly enhance the type and quality of information that may be obtained about the condition of large areas of an infrastructure system during a routine inspection. The project puts particular emphasis on collective sensor nets suitable for diagnosis of problems encountered in reinforced concrete structures.
Professor Andrea Alu’s research interests focus on the electromagnetic application of plasmonic materials and metamaterials. As one of such applications, he has shown that plasmonic covers may cloak dielectric and/or conducting objects to the electromagnetic wave, based on their negative local polarizability. This cloaking technique has been proven to be relatively robust to changes in the design parameters, geometry and frequency of operation and it has been recently extended to collections of particles, systems of relatively larger size and multi-frequency operation. Applications to camouflaging, non-invasive probing and sensing are foreseen, spanning various applications in medicine, biology, defense and telecommunications. Dr. Alu’s research findings on cloaking and on optical nanocircuits and nanoantennas have garnered worldwide attention in the scientific press and the general public.
Professors Ali Yilmaz and Hao Ling received a $270K grant from the National Science Foundation to advance the understanding of radiowave propagation and antenna operation in forests by utilizing the latest advances in fast and scalable computational electromagnetics (CEM) algorithms. Dr. Yilmaz’s and Ling’s students will use the grant to develop novel CEM simulators on supercomputing clusters specially tailored for efficient and accurate simulation of wave propagation in forests. The researchers will employ these simulators to identify dominant and possibly new propagation phenomena and to design novel small antenna systems that efficiently couple radiated power to the identified propagation mechanisms.
This collaborative effort will demonstrate how the latest CEM solvers can be effectively tailored and deployed on high-performance computers to analyze complex systems in nature. The developed methodology can also benefit other applications involving wave interactions with synthetic media such as electromagnetic metamaterials.
Professor Ali Yilmaz recently received a $150K grant from the National Science Foundation to develop fast multiscale algorithms for computational electromagnetics (CEM). CEM algorithms in particular and numerical algorithms in general grind to a halt when confronted with problems involving real-world systems due to the “tyranny of scales”. Physical phenomena occurring across large ranges of length and time scales are often critical for the operation of complex systems; unfortunately, few conventional algorithms are efficient and robust enough for computations involving more than a single scale of interest. Innovative CEM algorithms are needed to overcome the difficulties inherent in multiscale modeling and analysis.
Dr. Yilmaz’s team will develop multiscale extensions for state-of-the-art fast algorithms and incorporate them to CEM simulators. The simulators resulting from this research effort will enable the first-principles analysis of a variety of challenging electromagnetic propagation, scattering, and radiation problems, which ultimately will advance the understanding, design, and optimization of complex engineering systems.
Shobha Sundar Ram wins Best Student Paper Award
One of Professor Hao Ling's graduate students, Shobha Sundar Ram, won the Best Student Paper Award at the 2008 IEEE Radar Conference. Her paper "Simulation of Human MicroDopplers using Computer Animation Data" outlines a new way to aid tracking human activities through building walls and other non-line-of-sight environments. This technology has important applications in search and rescue missions, law enforcement operations, and surveillance.
Ms. Ram compares existing animation data with Doppler radar data of humans engaged in different activities. Each movement has a unique radar signature called a MicroDoppler. The combination of the two sets of data produce virtual renderings similar to that of a video game.
