There is, I think, something ethereal about i —the square root of minus one. I remember first hearing about it at school. It seemed an odd beast at that time—an intruder hovering on the edge of reality.

Usually familiarity dulls this sense of the bizarre, but in the case of i it was the reverse: over the years the sense of its surreal nature intensified. It seemed that it was impossible to write mathematics that described the real world in …

I and i

Additive manufacturing of metallic components – Process, structure and properties

Freedom of design, mass customisation, waste minimisation and the ability to manufacture complex structures, as well as fast prototyping, are the main benefits of additive manufacturing (AM) or 3D printing. A comprehensive review of the main 3D printing methods, materials and their development in trending applications was carried out. In particular, the revolutionary applications of AM in biomedical, aerospace, buildings and protective structures were discussed. The current state of materials development, including metal alloys, polymer composites, ceramics and concrete, was presented. In addition, this paper discussed the main processing challenges with void formation, anisotropic behaviour, the limitation of computer design and layer-by-layer appearance. Overall, this paper gives an overview of 3D printing, including a survey on its benefits and drawbacks as a benchmark for future research and development.

Additive manufacturing (3D printing): A review of materials, methods, applications and challenges

This paper reviews the state-of-the-art of an important, rapidly emerging, manufacturing technology that is alternatively called additive manufacturing (AM), direct digital manufacturing, free form fabrication, or 3D printing, etc. A broad contextual overview of metallic AM is provided. AM has the potential to revolutionize the global parts manufacturing and logistics landscape. It enables distributed manufacturing and the productions of parts-on-demand while offering the potential to reduce cost, energy consumption, and carbon footprint. This paper explores the material science, processes, and business consideration associated with achieving these performance gains. It is concluded that a paradigm shift is required in order to fully exploit AM potential.

/pdf/metal-additive-manufacturing-a-review-lwo0wxslqj.pdf

Metal Additive Manufacturing: A Review

Natural structural materials are built at ambient temperature from a fairly limited selection of components. They usually comprise hard and soft phases arranged in complex hierarchical architectures, with characteristic dimensions spanning from the nanoscale to the macroscale. The resulting materials are lightweight and often display unique combinations of strength and toughness, but have proven difficult to mimic synthetically. Here, we review the common design motifs of a range of natural structural materials, and discuss the difficulties associated with the design and fabrication of synthetic structures that mimic the structural and mechanical characteristics of their natural counterparts.

Bioinspired structural materials

A quasi-analytical method to carry out the quasi-TEM study of a microstrip line embedded in a general layered substrate with rectangular enclosure is presented. Electric walls, magnetic walls, and periodic boundary conditions are considered. The analysis is based on the spectral-domain formulation and the use of a proper expansion of the free charge distribution (Chebyshev polynomials with edge condition). Two different approaches are proposed to speed up the evaluation of the spectral series in such a way that only a few spectral terms must be retained in the numerical computations of the mentioned series. The propagation parameters and the charge distribution are obtained with extreme accuracy in fractions of one second on a personal computer. >

/pdf/quasi-analytical-static-solution-of-the-boxed-microstrip-4mevpvsepg.pdf

Quasi-analytical static solution of the boxed microstrip line embedded in a layered medium

A novel balanced bandpass filter (BPF) based on folded stepped impedance resonators (FSIR's) with modified ground plane is presented in this work. By symmetrically introducing a series-LC resonant structure below the FSIR's, common-mode (CM) propagation can be rejected without affecting differential-mode (DM) performance. The filter presents two main advantages with respect to the conventional solid-ground-plane FSIR filter: i) an important improvement of the CM rejection level within the differential passband and ii) an enhanced filter selectivity due to the inclusion of an extra transmission zero in the differential passband. Both the conventional and the novel filters have been modeled as lumped-element circuits that fully account for DM and CM operation. Simulation and measurement results confirm the benefits of the proposed balanced BPF.

Compact Balanced FSIR Bandpass Filter Modified for Enhancing Common-Mode Suppression

This paper reports on an enhanced implementation of the spectral-domain analysis (SDA) of boxed multistrip or multislot transmission lines embedded in a layered medium, including biaxial materials. Very high numerical efficiency is attained by a suitable basis and mixed SDA and spatial-domain technique to calculate the entries of the Galerkin matrix. Convergence properties of SDA are drastically improved, making it competitive with other analytical techniques [such as regular singular integral equation (RSIE)]. The method allows quick and accurate computation of current/field distributions.

On the efficient implementation of SDA for boxed strip-like and slot-like structures

A novel microstrip differential transmission line with common-mode noise suppression is proposed and experimentally validated. It is implemented by periodically etching complementary split ring resonators (CSRRs) in the ground plane. For the differential signals, the symmetry of the structure efficiently cancels the electric field components axial to the CSRRs, and these particles have no effect on signal transmission. However, the CSRRs are activated under common mode excitation, with the result of a stop-band behavior. For the designed and fabricated prototype device, over 20 dB suppression of common-mode noise is achieved over a frequency range from 1.18 GHz to 1.74 GHz.

Split rings-based differential transmission lines with common-mode suppression

This paper presents an algorithm for the acceleration of the series involved in the computation of 2-D homogeneous Green's functions with 1-D and 2-D periodicities. The algorithm is based on an original implementation of the spectral Kummer-Poisson's method, and it can be applied to the efficient computation of a wide class of infinite series. In the algorithm the number of asymptotic terms retained in Kummer's transformation is externally controlled so that any of the series that has to be accelerated is split into one series with exponential convergence and another series with algebraic convergence of arbitrarily large order. Numerical simulations have shown that there is an ldquooptimumrdquo number of asymptotic terms retained in Kummer's transformation for which the CPU time needed in the summation of the series is minimized. The CPU times required by Ewald's method for the evaluation of 2-D Green's functions with 1-D and 2-D periodicities have been compared with those required by the present algorithm, and the algorithm has been found to be between 1.2 and 3 times faster than Ewald's method when working in ldquooptimumrdquo operation conditions.

Francisco Medina

Papers

Quasi-analytical static solution of the boxed microstrip line embedded in a layered medium

Compact Balanced FSIR Bandpass Filter Modified for Enhancing Common-Mode Suppression

On the efficient implementation of SDA for boxed strip-like and slot-like structures

Split rings-based differential transmission lines with common-mode suppression

An Efficient Approach for the Computation of 2-D Green's Functions With 1-D and 2-D Periodicities in Homogeneous Media