Generalized Negative-Refractive-Index Transmission Lines and Their  Application to Microwave Devices

Colan Ryan

The Edward S. Rogers Sr. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (Electromagnetics)

Abstract:

Negative-refractive-index transmission lines (NRI-TLs) have found awide variety of uses in microwave devices.  In these structures both right-  and left- handed propagation bands exist and by controlling the dispersion properties, these NRI-TL devices can, for instance, be reduced in size compared to conventional right-handed components or can be made to operate over multiple frequency bands.  A generalized NRI-TL (G-NRI-TL) unit cell possesses two pairs of right-  and left-handed bands, but doubles the number of circuit elements over the standard NRI-TL; its advantage, therefore, lies in creating dual-band or multi-band devices.  A fully-printed unit cell is presented and various applications using the G-NRI-TL, including leaky-wave antennas, couplers, and resonant antennas, are discussed.

Biography:

Colan Ryan received his B.A.Sc. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Ottawa in 2006.  During his time there, he interned with Edgewater Computer Systems and served as an NSERC Student Researcher in the Department of Electronics at Carleton University. In the latter position, he developed a MEMS-based reconfigurable PIFA antenna and has jointly filed for a US patent on the design.  After completing his M.A.Sc. thesis at the Royal Military College of Canada in collaboration with the Communication Research Centre in Ottawa, he joined the Electromagnetics group at U of T as a Ph. D. student under the supervision of Dr. George Eleftheriades; his research interests include antenna design and transmission-line metamaterials.