Professors Ali Yilmaz and Hao Ling received a $270K grant from the National Science Foundation to advance the understanding of radiowave propagation and antenna operation in forests by utilizing the latest advances in fast and scalable computational electromagnetics (CEM) algorithms. Dr. Yilmaz’s and Ling’s students will use the grant to develop novel CEM simulators on supercomputing clusters specially tailored for efficient and accurate simulation of wave propagation in forests. The researchers will employ these simulators to identify dominant and possibly new propagation phenomena and to design novel small antenna systems that efficiently couple radiated power to the identified propagation mechanisms.

This collaborative effort will demonstrate how the latest CEM solvers can be effectively tailored and deployed on high-performance computers to analyze complex systems in nature. The developed methodology can also benefit other applications involving wave interactions with synthetic media such as electromagnetic metamaterials.