A New Way of Generating Electromagnetic Wave in RF-Challenged Environments for Navigation and Communication

The use of electromagnetic (EM) waves has revolutionized our lives by allowing us to communicate with people from nearly anywhere on the planet, pinpoint our location with incredible accuracy, and navigate unfamiliar roads. Modern lifestyles would not be possible without these technologies. However, because of losses occurring at higher frequencies, the use of EM waves has mainly been limited to terrestrial wireless communications, navigation, and location finding.

Extremely low frequency and very low frequency ELF/VLF EM waves (300 Hz 30 kHz) are of interest due to their low propagation loss in RF challenged environments (underwater, underground, and mud). However, current ELF/VLF EM wave generators are not suitable for applications, such as portable communication and navigation systems due to their large size and high power requirements.

This project aims to provide a new method to generate ELF/VLF waves with orders of magnitude smaller dimensions and power requirements. The findings of this study, if successful, will considerably increase knowledge and understanding in the field of low-frequency EM wave generation and will likely have broad impacts on environmental monitoring, aquatic eco-system analysis, ocean accident remediation, homeland security, oil and gas exploration, and aquaculture.

Advances from the research topics will be disseminated widely through academic courses on antennas and EM wave propagation and through undergraduate research opportunities. The broadening of participation will be achieved by explicitly working with underrepresented students through ongoing programs at Virginia Tech. Besides, educational laboratory activities and classroom modules, developed in partnership with the C-Tech2 program at Virginia Tech, the PI will expose high school and middle school underrepresented students to basic research and underlying ELF/VLF wave generation principles.

The objective of this project is to design, develop, and test small and energy-efficient ELF/VLF EM wave generators by leveraging the strong magnetic flux of a permanent magnet. The strong magnetic flux from a permanent magnet will be used to convert into an EM wave using a time-variant reluctance shield. Based on the PI’s proof of concept design the proposed research will also focus on miniaturization and power consumption reduction for the EM wave generator.

The outcomes of this project will include the development of new analysis and design methods for a permanent magnet-based EM wave generation, system analysis including link budget, experimental prototype development, and testing.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.