Date of Award

2021

Document Type

Open Access Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy in Electrical Engineering (PhD)

Administrative Home Department

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

Advisor 1

Warren Perger

Committee Member 1

Durdu Guney

Committee Member 2

Tony Pinar

Committee Member 3

Ramy El-Ganainy

Abstract

Thousands of years ago human discovered that if a slice of amber is rubbed against fur, it would absorb light-weight objects. Hundreds of years after that the ancient people figured out that there are actually two different characteristics of attraction and repulsion. Another 2000 years passed when human discovered that these two wonders of nature, magnetism and electricity are actually linked together like the two sides of the same coin. Since then, in the early 19th century great huge achievements were made in antennas and propagation by scientists such as Hans Christen Oersted, Heinrich Hertz, Alexander Popov and Marconi. Since then, antennas have found their enormous applications in military, medical and industrial arenas. In the endless world of antennas, we have picked up leaky wave antennas to further investigate their interesting properties and worked on at least 2 applications of such propagation systems in the medical field as well as in automotive field such as road safety. In our research, we have designed one-dimensional and two-dimensional leaky wave antennas to apply the main beam to the cancerous tissue by using the beam scanning property of these antennas. We could shift the main beam to another location in the tissue. Two-dimensional leaky wave antennas provide more beam flexibility in terms of beam geometry and beam displacement which will be discussed in the corresponding chapters.

Improving road safety with equipping vehicles with sensing systems such as frequency modulated continuous wave (FMCW) automotive radar systems is one of the most interesting topics in radar engineering. Surely, the main factor that could influence the mass production of cheap radar systems for automobiles is influenced by what antenna system is designed for that radar system. In this dissertation, we have proposed an FMCW radar system using a cheap antenna solution. The proposed antenna system is comb-line leaky wave antenna. The performance of the proposed radar system has been evaluated using range-Doppler graphs and we have also discussed a common problem in multi-target FMCW radar systems which is the issue of the ghost targets.

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