9/21/2009 Susan Kantor, ECE ILLINOIS
ECE Professor Jianming Jin recently published a book Finite Element Analysis of Antennas and Arrays (John Wiley 2009) with Douglas Riley of Northrop Grumman.
Written by Susan Kantor, ECE ILLINOIS
ECE Professor Jianming Jin recently published a book, Finite Element Analysis of Antennas and Arrays (John Wiley, 2009) with Douglas Riley of Northrop Grumman. The book is the product of nearly five years of research from a Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative (MURI) grant from the Department of Defense.
“The program tasked us to develop novel computational methodologies for simulating antennas and phased arrays,” Jin said. “We’ve made a lot of progress in dealing with challenging problems in this area. One of the reasons we wrote this book is because it’s close to the end of the grant, and publishing a book is a good opportunity to report what we have done in the past five years.”
This book is also the result of collaboration with engineers from industry, especially Riley, who works at Northrop Grumman.
“[Riley] knows the practical problems,” Jin said. “He knows what the tough problems we haven’t solved are.” Jin added that they have worked together for many years, examining difficult problems, creating solutions, and applying them to practical applications.
Since the book is a result of such collaboration with industry, it covers a variety of practical examples of antenna analysis. It is written as a reference book for graduate students and practicing engineers in industry rather than as a textbook. The book contains color inserts to describe various types of antennas, from antennas designed in a lab to antennas used in industry. “These are very challenging problems that we cannot imagine in the university,” Jin said. “You have to work with people in industry to see such complicated problems.”
Jin said antenna modeling and simulation is increasingly important in defense applications. On a typical airplane, more than 100 antennas are used for a variety of applications, including surveillance, communication, missile control, and tracking targets for fighters.
“Antenna modeling and simulation is becoming very important especially for defense applications,” Jin said. “The government has realized the importance of antennas for military applications, so they have put in a tremendous amount of resources to develop modeling and simulation software to design complicated antennas.”
Jin is also the author or co-author of, The Finite Element Method in Electromagnetics (Wiley, 1st edition 1993, 2nd edition 2002), Computation of Special Functions (Wiley, 1996), Electromagnetic Analysis and Design in Magnetic Resonance Imaging (CRC, 1998), and Fast and Efficient Algorithms in Computational Electromagnetics (Artech, 2001).