UT ECE graduate student Chenchen Li recently won first prize in the 2013 FEKO Student Competition. Chenchen's research was "motivated by significant concerns in the radar community about the rapidly growing number of wind farms.  These concerns arose from the time-varying radar clutter caused by wind turbines that can interfere with radar detection and tracking operations.  Chenchen pointed out in his entry that it is important to understand the dynamic radar signatures from wind turbines in order to devise mitigation approaches."

Li is supervised by UT ECE professor Hao Ling, the L. B. (Preach) Meaders Professor in Engineering.

In his presentation entitled "Dynamic Radar Signatures of Wind Turbines – Simulation and Measurement", he gives a thorough description of his work involving FEKO.  In his studies so far he has investigated the dynamic backscattering of a single small wind turbine.  His approach was to use FEKO's Physical Optics solver to simulate a spinning wind turbine and to verify the results through in situ measurements of the small wind turbine with a commercially available radar module. He performed post-processing on the simulated field results to present the dynamic signatures by means of sinograms, spectograms and ISAR images, clearly explaining what can be observed from each of these diagrams.  He also combined ISAR snapshots to create a composite radar image of the turbine.

About FEKO and EMSS - EM Software & Systems-S.A. (Pty) Ltd.

FEKO (www.feko.info) is a comprehensive computational electromagnetics code (CEM code) that is used widely in the telecommunications, automobile, space and defence industries. FEKO offers several solution techniques (MoM, MLFMM, PO, Ray Launching GO, UTD and FEM) under a single licence. Hybridisation of these techniques enables the efficient analysis of a very broad spectrum of EM problems e.g. 3D antenna design, antenna placement on electrically large structures, microstrip-antennas, microstrip-circuits, EMC, biomedical and scattering. With the MLFMM, and the true hybridisation of the solvers, FEKO is considered the global market leader for antenna placement analysis. FEKO® has a well-established global distribution and technical support network with subsidiary companies in North America, Europe, China and representatives in 10 other countries.  EMSS (www.emss.co.za) was started in 1994 as an engineering company consulting in general electromagnetic problems.

FEKO and EMSS contributed to this report.