See our publication list for detail of our research activities.
Design and fabrication of composite materials for electronic, magnetic and optical applications.
Topics of present interest to our group are the design and fabrication of isotropic negative-index (NI) materials by the dispersion of appropriately engineered multi-layer filler particles in a matrix. Theoretical calculations of electromagnetic scattering by such composites guide our search for the correct combination of materials in a multi-layer particle that will realise NI behavior in practice.
Design and practice of new and traditional NDE methods including microwave, capacitive, eddy-current and four-point measurements for evaluation of material properties, detection and characterization of flaws.
In recent years we have developed and validated the theory of four-point alternating-current potential drop measurements for the purpose of characterizing the depth of hardening in surface-hardened steel. This is a problem of interest to many companies, including those in the automobile industry.
For the US Air Force we are developing a relatively cheap, portable, methods of observing defects and discontinuities in radome structures using resonant microwave patch antennas and co-planar capacitive sensors.
For NASA we are developing a capacitive NDE method for assessing the integrity of electrical wiring insulation by nondestructively measuring the dielectric properties of the insulation material. We have studied extensively the effect of various degradation mechanisms on the dielectric properties of PTFE (Teflon), ETFE (Tefzel) and PI (Kapton) air- and spacecraft wiring insulation materials.