Antennas and Electromagnetics Group seminar – 23rd October 2026
When: Friday, October 23, 2026, 3:00 PM - 4:00 PM
Where: Online
On the 23rd of Oct. 2026 we will have a talk from Dr Shefali Pawar. The title of Dr Shefali Pawar’s talk is: “Cloaking of Patch Antennas and Arrays with Coated Metasurfaces”. The full details of the talk are given below.
Synopsis: It is a well-known fact that antennas form the very core of modern wireless communication systems. As such, an escalating demand for increase in the wireless system capacity necessitates accommodation of densely packed antennas in a very compact space. However, a practical design of such dense antenna systems may not only be cumbersome but could also lead to the deterioration of the overall system performance, considering the fact that such a system may suffer from destructive interference. In this regard, we endeavor to curb the detrimental effects of mutual coupling by exploiting the concept of electromagnetic invisibility, essentially employing active suppression techniques for improved wireless communications. Specialized covers, called metasurface cloaks are designed and studied using CST studio software package, aiming to facilitate the decoupling and cloaking phenomena in printed antennas as well as their interleaved array scenarios. In particular, we demonstrate that when the top surface of each patch antenna is coated by the specially tailored metasurface, they are decoupled (the effects of mutual coupling are nullified) from each other and restoration of their radiation patterns are also observed as if they were functioning in an isolated fashion (despite the two patches being confined close to each other). We then extend the cloak design to one dimensional linear interleaved rectangular patch array configuration and effectively demonstrate efficient array performance, which means that the dimensional area initially established for one array is now perfectly capable of accommodating two separate phased arrays, possibly leading to applications with compact space utilization.
Speaker bio: Dr. Shefali Pawar was born in Kolkata, India, in 1992. She received the B.E. degree in 2015 and the M.E. degree in 2018 in electronics and telecommunication engineering from the University of Mumbai, Mumbai, India. She earned her Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering at the Univer-sity of Mississippi, Oxford, MS, USA. While pursuing the PhD degree, she was a Research Assistant with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Mississippi, Oxford.
Dr. Pawar is a member of the IEEE and the IEEE-APS society. Her research interest includes an-tennas and propagation, RF and microwaves, multiband and broadband microstrip antennas, and metamaterial structures for cloaking of antennas and antenna arrays and has several journal and conference publications to her credit (Google Scholar).
Key contact: James Kelly.