Cross-polarisation applied to the study of liquid crsytalline ordering

Cross polarisation is extensively used in solid state NMR for enhancing signals of nuclei with low gyromagnetic ratio. However, the use of the method for providing quantitative structural and dynamics information is limited. This arises due to the fact that the mechanism which is responsible for cross polarisation namely, the dipolar interaction, has a long range and is also anisotropic. In nematic liquid crystals these limitations are easily overcome since molecules orient in a magnetic field. The uniaxial ordering of the molecules essentially removes problems associated with the angular dependence of the interactions encountered in powdered solids. The molecular motion averages out intermolecular dipolar interaction, while retaining partially averaged intramolecular interaction. In this article the use of cross polarisation for obtaining heteronuclear dipolar couplings and hence the order parameters of liquid crystals is presented. Several modifications to the basic experiment were considered and their utility illustrated. A method for obtaining proton-proton dipolar couplings, by utilizing cross polarisation from the dipolar reservoir, is also presented.

Dynamic nuclear polarisation enhanced (14)N overtone MAS NMR spectroscopy.

Dynamic nuclear polarisation (DNP) has been used to obtain magic angle spinning (14)N(OT) (nitrogen-14 overtone) solid-state NMR spectra from several model amino acids, with both direct and indirect observation of the (14)N(OT) signal. The crystalline solids were impregnated with biradical solutions of organic liquids that do not dissolve the crystalline phase. The bulk phase was then polarized via(1)H spin diffusion from the highly-polarized surface (1)H nuclei, resulting in (1)H DNP signal enhancements of around two orders of magnitude. Cross polarisation from (1)H nuclei directly to the (14)N overtone transition is demonstrated under magic angle spinning, using a standard pulse sequence with a relatively short contact time (on the order of 100 μs). This method can be used to acquire (14)N overtone MAS powder patterns that match closely with simulated line shapes, allowing isotropic chemical shifts and quadrupolar parameters to be measured. DNP enhancement also allows the rapid acquisition of 2D (14)N(OT) heteronuclear correlation spectra from natural abundance powder samples. (1)H-(14)N(OT) HETCOR and (13)C-(14)N(OT) HMQC pulse sequences were used to observe all single-bond H-N and C-N correlations in histidine hydrochloride monohydrate, with the spectra obtained in a matter of hours. Due to the high natural abundance of the (14)N isotope (99.6%) and the advantages of observing the overtone transition, these methods provide an attractive route to the observation of C-N correlations from samples at natural isotopic abundance and enable the high resolution measurement of (14)N chemical shifts and quadrupolar interaction parameters.

Orientation robust transmit polarization diversity techniques

Polarisation diversity is a technique to improve the quality of mobile communications, but its reliability is suboptimal because it depends on the mobile channel and the antenna orientations at both ends of the mobile link. A method to optimise the reliability is established by minimising the dependency on antenna orientations. While the mobile base station can have fixed antenna orientation, the mobile terminal is typically a handheld device with random orientations. This means orientation invariance needs to be established at the receiver in the downlink, and at the transmitter in the uplink. This research presents separate solutions for both cases, and is based on the transmission of an elliptically polarised signal synthesised from the channel statistics. Complete receiver orientation invariance is achieved in the downlink. Effects of the transmitter orientation are minimised in the uplink.

Investigation of exchange of energy between zeeman and dipolar reservoirs in the rotating frame in solids

Exchange of energy between Zeeman and dipolar reservoirs in the rotating frame during spin-lock has important implications for the understanding of the Hartmann-Hahn cross polarisation process and is examined here with experiments on ammonium dihydrogen phosphate. It is observed that energy exchange between the two reservoirs takes place indicating that the relative magnitude of the dipolar coupling in relation to the applied r.f. field may have a role to play in determining the rate of exchange of energy between the two reservoirs.

Compact quadrifilar helix antenna

Introduction: The quadrifilar helix antenna (QHA) is used widely for terrestrial [1] and space communication systems [2], where it is necessary to generate a circularly polarised cardioid-shaped radiation pattern with a high front-to-back ratio and low cross-polarisation. The radiating structure comprises four helical conductors which are excited in phase quadrature at the feed point, which is usually located at the centre of the top radials. The physical size of the quadrifilar antenna can be reduced by dielectric loading [3] or by meandering the printed linear elements [4]. However, in the former arrangement dielectric absorption reduces the radiation efficiency of the antenna, and the latter technique is not suitable for constructing free standing wire structures, which are normally used for spacecraft payloads in the VHF and UHF bands [2]. This Letter shows that a significant reduction in the axial length of a 1/2 turn half-wavelength QHA can be achieved by modifying the geometry of the helices in the region around the midpoint where a current null exists. Simulated and experimental results at L band are used to show that a size reduction of up to 15% is possible without significantly degrading the pattern shape and the bandwidth.

ARTIFICIAL SURFACES WITH INTERWOVEN AND TESSELLATED PATTERNED CONDUCTORS: PROPERTIES AND PHENOMENOLOGY

The features of artificial surfaces composed of doubly periodic patterns of interwoven planar conductors are discussed. The free-standing intertwined quadrifilar spirals and modified Brigid's crosses are presented as illustrative examples to demonstrate the highly stable angular reflection and transmittance response with low cross-polarisation and a broad fractional bandwidth. The main mechanisms contributing to the substantially sub-wavelength response of these arrays are discussed showing that interweaving their conductor patterns provides concurrent control of both the equivalent capacitance and inductance of the unit cell. The effects of dielectric substrate and conductor thickness on the properties of intertwined spiral and modified Brigid's cross arrays are discussed to provide insight in the effect of the structure parameters on array performance.

Corrugated flange technique for beam shaping of sectoral electromagnetic horn antennas

The need for improved feed systems for large reflector antennas employed in Radio Astronomy and Satellite tracking spurred the interest in horn antenna research in the 1960's. The major requirements were to reduce spill over, cross-polarisation losses,and to enhance the aperture efficiency to the order of about 75-8O%L The search for such a feed culminated in the corrugated horn. The corrugat1e 1 horn triggered widespread interest and enthusiasm, and a large amount of work(32’34’49’5O’52’53’58’65’75’79)has already been done on this type of antennas. The properties of corrugated surfaces has been investigated in detail. It was strongly felt that the flange technique and the use of corrugated surfaces could be merged together to obtain the advantages of both. This is the idea behind the present work. Corrugations are made on the surface of flange elements. The effect of various corrugation parameters are studied. By varying the flange parameters, a good amount of data is collected and analysed to ascertain the effects of corrugated flanges. The measurements are repeated at various frequencies, in the X— and S-bands. The following parameters of the system were studied: (a) beam shaping (b) gain (c) variation of V.S.U.R. (d) possibility of obtaining circularly polarised radiation from the flanged horn. A theoretical explanation to the effects of corrugated flanges is attempted on the basis of the line-source theory. Even though this theory utilises a simplified model for the calculation of radiation patterns, fairly good agreement between the computed pattern and experimental results are observed.

Changes in sewage sludge carbon forms along a treatment stream

The behaviour and fate of macronutrients and pollutants in sewage sludge applied to the land are affected by the chemical composition of the sludge organic matter, which in turn is influenced by both sewage source and by sewage treatment processes. In this study, 13C nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy was used to characterise the organic matter of sludges collected at three different points along the treatment stream of a municipal sewage works with a domestic catchment. Sludge at the first point, an undigested liquid (UL) sludge, had a substantially different composition to the anaerobically digested (AD) and dewatered sludge cake (DC) materials, which were similar to each other. In particular, the UL sludge contained more alkyl C than the AD or DC sludges. All three sludges were found to contain mobile alkyl C that is poorly observed using the cross polarisation (CP) technique, necessitating the use of the less sensitive, but more quantitatively reliable direct polarisation (DP) technique to obtain accurate distributions of C types.

Development of Efficient Techniques for the Analysis and Design of Antennas in Dual-Reflectarray Configuration

This thesis contributes to the analysis and design of printed reflectarray antennas. The main part of the work is focused on the analysis of dual offset antennas comprising two reflectarray surfaces, one of them acts as sub-reflector and the second one acts as mainreflector. These configurations introduce additional complexity in several aspects respect to conventional dual offset reflectors, however they present a lot of degrees of freedom that can be used to improve the electrical performance of the antenna. The thesis is organized in four parts: the development of an analysis technique for dualreflectarray antennas, a preliminary validation of such methodology using equivalent reflector systems as reference antennas, a more rigorous validation of the software tool by manufacturing and testing a dual-reflectarray antenna demonstrator and the practical design of dual-reflectarray systems for some applications that show the potential of these kind of configurations to scan the beam and to generate contoured beams. In the first part, a general tool has been implemented to analyze high gain antennas which are constructed of two flat reflectarray structures. The classic reflectarray analysis based on MoM under local periodicity assumption is used for both sub and main reflectarrays, taking into account the incident angle on each reflectarray element. The incident field on the main reflectarray is computed taking into account the field radiated by all the elements on the sub-reflectarray.. Two approaches have been developed, one which employs a simple approximation to reduce the computer run time, and the other which does not, but offers in many cases, improved accuracy. The approximation is based on computing the reflected field on each element on the main reflectarray only once for all the fields radiated by the sub-reflectarray elements, assuming that the response will be the same because the only difference is a small variation on the angle of incidence. This approximation is very accurate when the reflectarray elements on the main reflectarray show a relatively small sensitivity to the angle of incidence. An extension of the analysis technique has been implemented to study dual-reflectarray antennas comprising a main reflectarray printed on a parabolic surface, or in general in a curved surface. In many applications of dual-reflectarray configurations, the reflectarray elements are in the near field of the feed-horn. To consider the near field radiated by the horn, the incident field on each reflectarray element is computed using a spherical mode expansion. In this region, the angles of incidence are moderately wide, and they are considered in the analysis of the reflectarray to better calculate the actual incident field on the sub-reflectarray elements. This technique increases the accuracy for the prediction of co- and cross-polar patterns and antenna gain respect to the case of using ideal feed models. In the second part, as a preliminary validation, the proposed analysis method has been used to design a dual-reflectarray antenna that emulates previous dual-reflector antennas in Ku and W-bands including a reflectarray as subreflector. The results for the dualreflectarray antenna compare very well with those of the parabolic reflector and reflectarray subreflector; radiation patterns, antenna gain and efficiency are practically the same when the main parabolic reflector is substituted by a flat reflectarray. The results show that the gain is only reduced by a few tenths of a dB as a result of the ohmic losses in the reflectarray. The phase adjustment on two surfaces provided by the dual-reflectarray configuration can be used to improve the antenna performance in some applications requiring multiple beams, beam scanning or shaped beams. Third, a very challenging dual-reflectarray antenna demonstrator has been designed, manufactured and tested for a more rigorous validation of the analysis technique presented. The proposed antenna configuration has the feed, the sub-reflectarray and the main-reflectarray in the near field one to each other, so that the conventional far field approximations are not suitable for the analysis of such antenna. This geometry is used as benchmarking for the proposed analysis tool in very stringent conditions. Some aspects of the proposed analysis technique that allow improving the accuracy of the analysis are also discussed. These improvements include a novel method to reduce the inherent cross polarization which is introduced mainly from grounded patch arrays. It has been checked that cross polarization in offset reflectarrays can be significantly reduced by properly adjusting the patch dimensions in the reflectarray in order to produce an overall cancellation of the cross-polarization. The dimensions of the patches are adjusted in order not only to provide the required phase-distribution to shape the beam, but also to exploit the crosses by zero of the cross-polarization components. The last part of the thesis deals with direct applications of the technique described. The technique presented is directly applicable to the design of contoured beam antennas for DBS applications, where the requirements of cross-polarisation are very stringent. The beam shaping is achieved by synthesithing the phase distribution on the main reflectarray while the sub-reflectarray emulates an equivalent hyperbolic subreflector. Dual-reflectarray antennas present also the ability to scan the beam over small angles about boresight. Two possible architectures for a Ku-band antenna are also described based on a dual planar reflectarray configuration that provides electronic beam scanning in a limited angular range. In the first architecture, the beam scanning is achieved by introducing a phase-control in the elements of the sub-reflectarray and the mainreflectarray is passive. A second alternative is also studied, in which the beam scanning is produced using 1-bit control on the main reflectarray, while a passive subreflectarray is designed to provide a large focal distance within a compact configuration. The system aims to develop a solution for bi-directional satellite links for emergency communications. In both proposed architectures, the objective is to provide a compact optics and simplicity to be folded and deployed.

Polarisation independent bandpass FSS

The spectral transmittance of a frequency selective surface (FSS), which consists of two free-standing arrays of short-circuited nested annular slots, is presented. The FSS was designed to provide a minimum of 20 dB isolation between the frequency bands 316.5-325.5 and 349.5-358.5 GHz when the filter operates in the TE and TM planes at 45 degrees incidence. Experimental results, which are in close agreement with the computed transmission coefficients, show that the maximum insertion loss is 0.9 dB, and the minimum cross-polar discrimination is at least 21 dB in the passbands. The FSS yields virtually identical spectral responses in the two polarisation planes over the frequency range 315-359 GHz.

Simple control of the polarisation in uniform hybrid waveguide-planar leaky-wave antennas

A simple and original mechanism to control the polarisation of uniform hybrid waveguide-planar leaky-wave antennas is proposed. The operation is based on introducing simple modifications of the planar dimensions of the structure cross-section, which is shown to control the horizontal and vertical components of the radiated fields. The proposed antenna dispenses with the need for periodic elements, commonly used in flexible polarised leaky-wave antennas, and therefore significantly reduces the design complexity. Parametric curves have been obtained to assist in the simple and efficient design of the proposed antenna. The novel mechanism is illustrated by means of several antenna prototypes operating at 5.7 GHz, producing linear, elliptical and circular polarisations. Commercial three-dimensional Finite Element Method has been used for the simulations, and the results are validated with experimental testing.[br].

Future of skills in Europe-Convergence or polarisation? CEPS Working Document No. 390, 27 February 2014

In this Working Paper, based on nearly 20 papers produced by the Centre for European Policy Studies, Slovak Governance Institute and the Conference Board Europe, we examine whether the current trends in the areas of education and skills are pushing the European Union, towards convergence or polarisation. We cover a wide range of questions related to this main issue. No easy answers, but several cross-cutting messages emerged from the research. We demonstrated that there is increasing complexity in what a ‘low-skilled’ person is and how well (or poorly) s/he fares in the labour market. There are undoubtedly powerful forces pushing for more polarisation, particularly in the labour market. Our research confirmed that early childhood education plays an important role, and it also appears to be increasingly uncontested as a policy prescription. However, the other frequently emphasised remedy to inequality – less selection in secondary education, particularly later division of children into separate tracks – is more problematic. Its effectiveness depends on the country in question and the target group, while education systems are extremely difficult to shift even on a long-term basis. A different, more-nuanced type of warning to policy-makers is delivered in our research on returns to higher education by field of study, which showed hidden rationality in how students choose their major.

Implementation of optical fibre sensors with low thermal cross-sensitivity utilising ex-45° tilting grating structures

We report an implementation of optical fibre sensors based on fibre Bragg gratings with excessively tilted (>45°) structures, showing distinctive polarisation characteristics, desirable low thermal-cross-sensitivity and enhanced responsivity to surrounding-medium-refractive-index.