Efficient Operator Marching Method for Analyzing Crossed Arrays of Cylinders

Periodic structures involving crossed arrays of cylinders appear as special three-dimensional photonic crystals and cross-stacked gratings. Such a structure consists of a number of layers where each layer is periodic in one spatial direction and invariant in another direction. They are relatively simple to fabricate and have found valuable applications. For analyzing scattering properties of such structures, general computational electromagnetics methods can certainly be used, but special methods that take advantage of the geometric features are often much more efficient. In this paper, an efficient method based on operators mapping electromagnetic field components between two spatial directions is developed to analyze structures with crossed arrays of circular cylinders. The method is much simpler than an earlier method based on similar ideas, and it does not require evaluating slowly converging lattice sums.

Metamaterials Fabricated of Amorphous Ferromagnetic Microwires: Negative Microwave Permeability

Microwave permeability of glass-coated ferromagnetic amorphous microwire exhibiting a weak negative magnetostriction has been studied. The diameter of the microwire was about 20 m and the diameter of the metal core was about 12 m. The microwire was wound to comprise a 7/3 washer-shaped composite sample with the volume fraction of magnetic constituent of about 10%. The permeability of the composite sample was measured in a coaxial line in the frequency range from 0.1 to 10 GHz. The composite was found to exhibit a negative permeability within the frequency range from approximately 0.7 to 1.5 GHz, with the permeability being as low as −0.4. Therefore, microwire-based composites, particularly, crossed arrays of microwires may be employed to develop metamaterials for microwave applications. In the composite, the negative microwave permeability is due to the natural ferromagnetic resonance and the negative microwave permittivity is due to the inherent inductance of the wire. Such metamaterials are advantageous in simple design, isotropic in-plane performance, and possible tunability of performance by external magnetic bias. However, for a feasible metamaterial fabricated from microwire arrays, the wires have to exhibit higher magnitude of the ferromagnetic resonance, higher quality factor, and higher resonance frequency.

An Adaptive One-Factor-at-a-Time Method for Robust Parameter Design: Comparison With Crossed Arrays via Case Studies

This paper presents a conceptually simple and resource efficient method for robust parameter design. The proposed method varies control factors according to an adaptive one-factor-at-a-time plan while varying noise factors using a two-level resolution III fractional factorial array. This method is compared with crossed arrays by analyzing a set of four case studies to which both approaches were applied. The proposed method improves system robustness effectively, attaining more than 80% of the potential improvement on average if experimental error is low. This figure improves to about 90% if prior knowledge of the system is used to define a promising starting point for the search. The results vary across the case studies, but, in general, both the average amount of improvement and the consistency of the results are better than those provided by crossed arrays if experimental error is low or if the system contains some large interactions involving two or more control factors. This is true despite the fact that the proposed method generally uses fewer experiments than crossed arrays. The case studies reveal that the proposed method provides these benefits by exploiting, with high probability, both control by noise interactions and also higher order effects involving two control factors and a noise factor. The overall conclusion is that adaptive one-factor-at-a-time, used in concert with factorial outer arrays, is demonstrated to be an effective approach to robust parameter design providing significant practical advantages as compared to commonly used alternatives.