Applied Electromagnetics

Research focus

The Peer review has evaluated this group as Average

The research activities of this group are focused to the applications of Electromagnetism to communications technologies; the background of the group components is both in electromagnetic theory and techniques and in microwave circuits. The specific expertise concerns the numerical methods for electromagnetics and the design techniques for active and passive microwave circuits. Innovative techniques for microwave circuits design The aim of this research area is to develop innovative and effective solutions for designing passive and active microwave circuits typically employed in telecommunications equipments (mobile communications, point-to-point and point-to-multipoint radio links). A significant part of the work concerns the area of microwave filters synthesis, where the goal is to develop novel techniques for evaluating the coupling matrix of inline topologies with arbitrary transmission zeros (practical applications concern filters for base stations and for millimeter wave radio links). Other topics under investigation are the synthesis of microwave duplexers and the synthesis of multi-band filters for mobile communications. Further research activities concern the physical dimensioning of filters by means of the space-mapping approach (a mixed technique which makes use of both efficient electromagnetic numerical methods and circuit modelling). Techniques for the automatic tuning of microwave filters are under investigation; they are based on a suitable implementation of the Cauchy method for the polynomial characterization of microwave two-port networks starting from the measured scattering parameters. Researches in the field of microwave active circuits are devoted to linearizers subsystems for power amplifiers; the goal is to develop innovative solutions particularly suited for monolithic integrated circuit implementation (active predistortion, error-envelope feedback). Also techniques for improving both linearity and efficiency are investigated. Numerical methods for electromagnetics The goal here is to develop efficient numerical techniques leading to an accurate full-wave analysis and design of microwave devices, such as filters, junctions, and feed-horns. We are working on two main topics: the first one is the extension of finite Integrate Technique (FIT) to include boundary quantities in order to apply this method for extracting equivalent circuits of various resonating cavities; the design of filters employing such cavities is then possible by a single frequency solution. The second topic is related to bodies of revolution formulations; in particular the study concerns an efficient implementation of the method of moments interfaced to the mode-matching method in order to analyze circular corrugated horns both standalone and in a cluster configuration. The feed horn coupling to a reflector is also taken into account by a perturbational approach based on the expansion of the PO scattered field in a sum of Gaussian beams. Finally, we are working on high order finite elements method applied to bodies of revolution, in order to take into account dielectric inclusions.

Dipartimento di afferenza

Dipartimento di Elettronica e Informazione (DEI)

Docenti afferenti

Gian Guido Gentili (associate professor)
Giuseppe Macchiarella (associate professor)
Marco Politi (associate professor)