FEKO Student Competition Results For 2012

Announcement of the FEKO Student Competition results for 2012. (November 2012)  of modified aperture bowtie antenna (R.G. Pierce)

This year's FEKO student competition drew entries from Asia, Africa, North America, South America, Europe and Australia. The entries featured numerous antenna design, analysis and placement projects. Examples of these were the analysis of a sinuous antenna and the comparison of various horn feeds for a parabolic reflector system. The design, manufacture and measurement were presented for several planar antennas, including a microstrip reflectarray and patch antennas with different types of polarisation and applications. Other entries included studies of Babinet's principle, the fundamental limit on antenna performance, Lüneberg reflectors and radomes.

Winner
This year's winner is Richard Pierce who is pursuing his PhD with Dr Rashaunda Henderson at the Electrical Engineering Department, University of Texas at Dallas, USA. His entry entitled "Modified Aperture Bowtie Antenna Created Using FEKO", presents a novel modified aperture bowtie antenna that uses edge modification to improve on the bandwidth of the parent aperture bowtie in a 50Ω system without increasing its size.  Richard motivates the use of coplanar waveguide to feed the antenna, which he carefully modelled and meshed in FEKO. His final design was fabricated and he shows comparisons between the simulation results and measurements.

Honourable Mention
Honourable Mention is made of Tresor Diakiese Sudikila's entry entitled "Design and Manufacturing of a Dual-Band, Dual-Polarized and Dual-Fed Perforated Array Patch Antenna Pair". Tresor is studying under the guidance of Dr. Ir. Thierry Gilles at the Royal Military Academy in Brussles, Belgium. In his entry he presents the design and realisation of a perforated dual array for spaceborne radar applications, consisting of a single L-band element perforated by a 4x2 C-band array. The array is dual-fed in that the L-band element is strip line fed and the C-band elements are pin-fed. He used the FEKO optimiser to search for parameters that would ensure a return loss below -10dB while maximising both the L-band and C-band gains.