Student Electrical Engineering, Telecommunications Engineering or similar (f/m/x) - Conception and Design of a Measurement Setup for Material Characterization

The Antenna Group of the Institute for Communications and Navigation of DLR is strongly active in the development of new high-performance, miniaturized antennas for navigation and communication applications in the L and K band.

A clear technological benefit can be obtained in this field by using new materials (both physical or artificial (also called metamaterials)), capable of exhibiting atipycal  dielectric and magnetic properties. For example materials with anisotropic and/or inhomogenous permittivities provide very exciting design possibilities due to the additional degrees of freedom provided. Such materials need however to be ad-hoc engineered, for instance by means of 3D printing. The dielectric and magnetic characteristics of the materials available for 3D printing are unfortunately often not fully known at the  frequency bands of interest: moreover, if the material is not fully filled, but engineered in a specific way, it is necessary to estimate the effective characteristics of the metamaterial produced. In order to successfully use such materials in the antenna design, those properties need to be precisely determined, by measuring them.

During the Master thesis, you will then need to get familiar with the current state of the art in measurement techniques used to estimate complex permittivity and permeability of materials and evaluate their applicability to our needs. Furthermore, you will develop a concept for such measurement system and then proceed to the actual design, manufacturing and test with different materials having already known characteristics. The work embraces a multidisciplinary activity where RF know-how and numerical simulations, as well as hands-on engineering and measurements will need to be used.