Near-field Method Research Articles

A Linear Near-Field Interference Cancellation Method Based on Deconvolved Conventional Beamformer Using Fresnel Approximation

In underwater acoustic detection using towed arrays, the in-band radiation noise of the tow-ship generates significant interference. In this article, a high-resolution spatial filter based on the deconvolved conventional beamformer (dCv) is proposed to mitigate the impact of this noise on the detection on the beam of interest. The tow-ship interference is near field, thus, the dCv cannot be applied directly as the point spread function is shift variant. In this work, a solution to this problem involving the Fresnel approximation is developed. It is demonstrated analytically that the Fresnel approximation is not sensitive to the accuracy of the estimation of the interference range, and its applicability depends on the arrival angle of the interference. Experimental results show that the linearity of the dCv spatial filter ensures that the amplitude and phase of the array signal can be retrieved with no distortion, which is critical for acoustic detection.

High-Efficiency Diagnosis of Antenna Radiation Characteristics Based on Scanning Optic-Induced Plasma Scattering Technology

This article presents an innovative quasi-real-time antenna near-field diagnosis method, by scanning a laser-induced plasma on a silicon wafer and imaging the field with the synchronously produced scattered signals. Several approaches have been devised to adapt to the antenna diagnosis scenarios. By using the multilayer matching approach, the issue of multiple reflection disturbance between the aperture and silicon wafer is avoided, especially for large aperture antennae at high frequencies. The accuracy of near-field distribution is improved, and far-field patterns can be transformed directly. The experimental results of a Ka-band 20 dB standard antenna agree well with the simulation results. Diagnosis of radiation states in the reactive near-field region is demonstrated, and the resonate modes of a 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi patch antenna at different frequencies are clearly observed. The experiments of a TM01 mode antenna verify the full polarization diagnosis ability of the method, and the linear polarization component is measured with the help of a polarization grid. The demonstrated diagnosis method has the advantages of high efficiency, ultraclose measurement distance, and superresolution and provides a highly promising and widely available method for antenna diagnosis.

Near-Field IPO for Analysis of EM Scattering from Multiple Hybrid Dielectric and Conductor Target and High Resolution Range Profiles

Aiming at improving the accuracy and efficiency of scattering information from multiple targets in near-field regions, this paper proposes a near-field iterative physical optics (IPO) method based on a modified near-field Green’s function for the composite electromagnetic scattering analysis of multiple hybrid dielectric and conductor targets. According to the electric field and magnetic field integral equation, the electric and magnetic current were updated utilizing the Jacobi iteration method. Then, by introducing an expansion center lying in the neighborhood of the source point, Green’s function was modified for near-field scattering between multiple hybrid dielectric and conductor targets. To accelerate the implementation of the procedure, the multilevel fast multipole method, the fast far-field approximation, and parallel multicore programming were introduced. Numerical results indicate that there is good agreement between the results calculated by the near-field IPO method and MLFMM solver in commercial software FEKO while significantly reducing the computational burden. To fully exploit the scattering information, the high resolution range profiles (HRRP) of different targets under different conditions were analyzed, which can be further applied for automatic target detection and recognition.

Novel cell balancing applied near-field coupling and Serial–Parallel Circuit configuration

This paper proposes a near-field cell balancing method to be applied to batteries of higher capacity and power. This method involves a wireless power transfer to balance battery cells, which produces higher efficiency than conventional passive approaches, and faster equalization than active approaches. Cell balancing is a crucial function of the battery management system (BMS) that maintains the balance of charge and discharge between cells of individual batteries. Furthermore, this method is designed to meet the increasing demand for faster cell balancing associated with high-capacity and high-power batteries. We selected a serial–parallel configuration to minimize the technical concern for isolation, or energy transfer to unselected cells. Experiments were conducted with two battery cells, and voltage equalization accelerated by 51% when the proposed cell balancing approach was applied.

Parallel implementations of the fast nearfield method for continuous-wave and transient pressure calculations

FOCUS, the “Fast Object-oriented C + + Simulator” (https://www.egr.msu.edu/∼fultras-web/), enables rapid calculations of continuous-wave and transient pressure fields generated by single transducers and phased arrays. FOCUS achieves small errors in relatively short computation times through memory-efficient calculations with the fast nearfield method, which converges exponentially. The fast nearfield method is also an embarrassingly parallel algorithm that supports further reductions in the computation time through hardware acceleration. Previous efforts to accelerate calculations with the fast nearfield method successfully implemented multithreading within multiple central processing unit (CPU) cores using OpenMP, and this capability is presently included with FOCUS. Prior success with OpenMP motivates ongoing efforts to further extend the functionality of FOCUS by interfacing the fast nearfield method to an NVIDIA graphics processing unit (GPU). To facilitate FOCUS calculations on a GPU, calculations with the fast nearfield method are implemented in CUDA for time-harmonic and transient pressure computations with each supported transducer shape. This combination achieves a significant reduction in the computation time compared to single-threaded execution. When evaluated on an NVIDIA 1670 GPU, the computation time is also approximately halved relative to the multithreaded OpenMP implementation. These results encourage further efforts to parallelize existing and future FOCUS routines.

Machine learning aided near-field acoustic holography based on equivalent source method.

In recent times, equivalent source method-based near-field acoustic holography methods have been extensively applied in sound source localization and characterization. The most commonly used equivalent sources are spherical harmonics. In a non-reverberant environment with no reflections, these equivalent sources could be the best choice since spherical harmonics are derived for the Sommerfeld boundary condition. However, these methods are not the best fit for reverberating environments. In such cases, a new relationship can be calculated between the field weights and the measured pressure with enough training examples. The proposed machine learning models include linear regression (LR) with adaptive moment estimation (Adam), LR with limited-memory Broyden-Fletcher-Goldfarb-Shanno (L-BFGS), and multi-layer perceptron with one and two hidden layers. These methods are tested for multiple monopoles and vibrating plate simulations in a room with different wall absorption coefficients. The data-driven methods are also studied on loudspeakers numerically and experimentally in a free field environment. The results from these methods are compared with the results of one norm convex optimization (L1CVX). LR with L-BFGS performed the best among all the methods studied and performed better than L1CVX for less absorption coefficient for geometrically separable sources. LR with L-BFGS also has much faster inference times.

Near-Field Detection Method for Light Intensity Based on Fourier Series Fitting

Near-Field Detection Method for Light Intensity Based on Fourier Series Fitting

Near-Field Calibration Methods for Integrated Analog Beamforming Arrays and Focal Plane Array Feeds

Near-Field Calibration Methods for Integrated Analog Beamforming Arrays and Focal Plane Array Feeds

Analytical solution to wave diffraction by a hemisphere in infinite water depth using the multipole expansion method

Linear water wave diffraction by a hemisphere in infinite water depth is investigated using the multipole expansion method in this paper. In the spherical coordinate system, the diffraction potential is expressed in the form of multipole wave potentials and the wave-free potential, as derived by Hulme (1982) for radiation potentials. The issues associated with the high-order multipole expansion are solved in this paper. The new method can calculate the multipole wave potentials at arbitrary orders and thus successfully calculate the diffraction potentials on the body surface and free surface around a hemisphere. The wave exciting forces acting on hemispheres are calculated using the near-field and far-field methods, which utilizes the radiation potential computed by Hulme's (1982) method to verify the accuracy of the analytical solution in this paper. Compared with the far-field method, the analytical solution in this paper converges more quickly as the truncation term N increases, especially when the wavenumber Ka is large. In this paper, the theory of applying the multipole expansion method to solve hydrodynamic problems with a hemisphere on the free surface is completed, which makes the multipole expansion method no longer limited to low-order expansion calculations and can be applied to more fields.

Multi-field coupling parameter regulation model of flexible circuit pattern using near-field electrohydrodynamic direct-writing method

Multi-field coupling parameter regulation model of flexible circuit pattern using near-field electrohydrodynamic direct-writing method

A Near-Field Meta-Steering Antenna System With Fully Metallic Metasurfaces

In the near-field meta-steering method, the near electric-field phase distribution is dynamically altered by rotating a pair of phase-gradient metasurfaces that are typically made out of dielectric lattices or metal patterns printed on bonded dielectric substrates. As a lightweight alternate, a new class of fully metallic metasurfaces (MMs) is proposed in this article. The lack of dielectrics not only substantially reduces the cost and weight but also increases its potential in space and high-power applications. More importantly, the new MMs are designed such that they can be made by cutting narrow slots in fully planar thin metal sheets, retaining structural rigidity while reducing the complexity, cost, and weight. The same MM works for any polarization. Each cell in the new MMs has close to ideal phase shift and transmission magnitude greater than −0.9 dB. A prototype was designed and fabricated to validate this MM-based beam-steering concept in the Ku-band. The maximum measured steering range in zenith is ±42°, with a full 360° steering in the azimuth. The measured 3 dB gain bandwidth is 700–800 MHz (5.6%–6.4%), and the measured gain variation (scan loss) when steering over the whole range is 2.2–4.5 dB. The weight density and thickness of each MM are 0.88 g/cm2 and <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$0.8\lambda _{0}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> , respectively. Including the feed, the total antenna height is <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$4.9\lambda _{0}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> .

Estimation of Resultant Airframe Forces for a Variable Pitch Fan Operating in Reverse Thrust Mode

AbstractThe resultant forces with a reverse thrust variable pitch fan (VPF) during the aircraft landing run are computed from the installed reverse thrust flow field obtained from an airframe-engine-VPF research model. The research model features a reverse flow capable VPF design in a future, geared, high-bypass ratio 40,000 lbf engine as installed onto a twin-engine airframe in landing configuration, complete with a rolling ground plane to mimic the runway. The reverse thrust flow field during the aircraft landing run is obtained from the three-dimensional RANS/URANS solutions of the model. The evolution of the installed dynamic reverse thrust flow field is characterized by the interaction of the VPF-induced reverse flow with the freestream. Several flow features like reverse flow wash-down by the freestream, external swirling helical flow development, pylon flow obstruction, 180 deg flow turn into the engine, subsequent separated flows, wake interactions, and multipass recirculating flows are observed. The resultant airframe forces due to the reverse thrust flow field are estimated by adaptations of momentum-based far-field and near-field methods. In the active thrust reverser engagement regime of 140 to 40 knots, the VPF generates a sufficient axial airframe decelerating force in the range of 45% to 8% of maximum takeoff thrust. A drag decomposition study and a notional “blocked-fan” analysis are described to understand the stack-up of the axial decelerating force. Additionally, the resultant force has a landing speed-dependent lateral force component because of the pylon obstruction-induced flow nonuniformity. A beneficial downforce component due to upward deflection of streamlines is also observed. The quantification of the resultant forces from the baseline installed airframe-engine-VPF reverse thrust flow field is a necessary step to explore the feasibility of the VPF reverse thrust system for future efficient turbofan architectures, understand force generation mechanisms, and to identify areas for subsequent design improvement.

An Efficient Near-Field Model Gain-Phase Self-Calibration Method for Uniform Rectangular Arrays

Large uniform rectangular arrays (URAs) are widely used in 3-D underwater imaging systems to obtain high-quality images; however, the gain and phase errors of these arrays can distort the results. To restore the image quality, many calibration methods have been proposed, most of which adopt a far-field model. This model requires the calibrator source to be far away, which reduces the signal-to-noise ratio and adversely affects the calibration accuracy. An effective means of alleviating this contradiction is to adopt the near-field signal model. However, the source location estimation in the near-field model typically uses spectral peak searches, which is a significant computational burden, particularly for large URAs. A fast and efficient near-field model self-calibration method for large URAs is proposed to obtain improved calibration results. First, a convenient preprocessing and two extended three-step iterative algorithms are used instead of spectral peak searches to estimate the source location efficiently. The array is then calibrated using a spatial matched filter and maximum <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">a posteriori</i> approach. Numerical results proved that the proposed method almost reaches the Cramér–Rao bound. Compared with existing near-field model calibration methods using spectral peak searches, the computational complexity of the proposed method is reduced by more than three orders of magnitude when the array size reaches 60 <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\times $</tex-math></inline-formula> 60 or more. By virtue of the near-field model, the phase calibration accuracy for large URAs at a close range is more than 10 times that of far-field model calibration methods.

Conjugate Augmented Decoupled 3-D Parameters Estimation Method for Near-Field Sources

A near-field source localization method is proposed for 2-D direction-of-arrival (DOA) and range estimation based on a symmetrical cross array. It first employs the conjugate symmetry property of signal autocorrelation for different time delays to construct a conjugate augmented spatial–temporal cross-correlation matrix, then the extended steering vector is decoupled to avoid the usual multidimensional search based on the properties of the Khatri–Rao product, and finally three 1-D MUSIC-type searches are employed to obtain the results. The proposed method can realize automatic pairing of multiple parameters associated with each source and it also works in the underdetermined case. Furthermore, the stochastic Cramer–Rao lower bound with different time delays is derived. Compared with two existing methods, simulation results demonstrate that the proposed method provides satisfactory estimation performance for both the DOA and range parameters at low signal-to-noise ratio and with a small number of snapshots.

SAR Antenna Pattern Measurement by Internal Calibration Method for GF-3 Satellite

GF-3 is the first C-band multipolarization synthetic aperture radar (SAR) satellite in China. The SAR system is equipped with an active phased array antenna to electronically generate various antenna beams. The accuracy of SAR antenna patterns is of main importance for precise SAR image processing. The traditional method for antenna pattern measurement is the near-field method but it is unable to satisfy the demand for fast measuring in-orbit. In order to measure the SAR antenna pattern quickly with high accuracy, we propose the internal calibration method. The internal calibration uses calibration signals which are routed along the nominal signal path in SAR systems, thus monitoring the gain and phase variations for each T/R channel is possible. This paper will focus on this method, including its principle, operation steps, and results, compared to the near-field method. The internal calibration method provides a valuable solution for SAR antenna pattern measurement.

Refractive index profile measurement of planar optical waveguides based on the near-field technique and digital holography

• A new method is proposed to measure the refractive index profile of planar optical waveguides. • A measurement system is established by integrating the near-field setup and the modified Mach-Zehnder interferometer. • The refractive index profile is quantitatively obtained from two phase difference distributions. • The accuracy of the proposed method is up to 1 × 10 −3 . A method based on the near-field technique and digital holography is proposed to measure the refractive index profile of planar optical waveguides. A measurement system is established by integrating the near-field setup and the modified Mach-Zehnder interferometer. The near-field intensity profile of optical waveguides is recorded by CCD to get the primary refractive index profile. The primary phase difference distribution is calculated based on the relationship between the phase and refractive index. The digital hologram is acquired by the modified Mach-Zehnder interferometer to extract the real phase difference distribution using the hybrid reconstruction algorithm. According to the relationship between the primary and real phase difference distributions, the refractive index profile is quantitatively obtained. To evaluate the proposed method, we measured the refractive index profiles of multimode and single-mode fibers and compared with S14 based on refracted near-field method and SHR-1802 based on digital holography. The proposed method has a measurement accuracy of up to 1 × 10 -3 and is suitable for measuring the positive refractive index region of waveguides.

A Near-Field Area Object Detection Method for Intelligent Vehicles Based on Multi-Sensor Information Fusion

In order to solve the difficulty for intelligent vehicles in detecting near-field targets, this paper proposes a near-field object detection method based on multi-sensor information fusion. Firstly, the F-CenterFusion method is proposed to fuse the information from LiDAR, millimeter wave (mmWave) radar, and camera to fully obtain target state information in the near-field area. Secondly, multi-attention modules are constructed in the image and point cloud feature extraction networks, respectively, to locate the targets’ class-dependent features and suppress the expression of useless information. Then, the dynamic connection mechanism is used to fuse image and point cloud information to enhance feature expression capabilities. The fusion results are input into the predictive inference head network to obtain target attributes, locations, and other data. This method is verified by the nuScenes dataset. Compared with the CenterFusion method using mmWave radar and camera fusion information, the NDS and mAP values of our method are improved by 5.1% and 10.9%, respectively, and the average accuracy score of multi-class detection is improved by 22.7%. The experimental results show that the proposed method can enable intelligent vehicles to realize near-field target detection with high accuracy and strong robustness.

Fast prediction method for multirotor global tonal noise based on acoustic modal analysis

With the popularity of multirotor aircraft, the aerodynamic noise it generates has an increasingly serious impact on the environment. A fast method for globally predicting the tonal noise is proposed in this study. The goal of this method is to predict the global aerodynamic noise at a small computational cost, then providing a fast model for online noise prediction and control. Firstly, the global noise model of a single rotor in acoustic modal domain is established by using the near-field acoustic holography method. Then, the global noise model of a rotor with different configurations is obtained by using the mapping relationship of acoustic modal coefficients. Subsequently, the global noise of multirotor is predicted based on the configuration information of rotors by using the wave superposition principle. To validate the performance of this method, the predicted global noises of single rotor and multi rotors were compared with other numerical methods. It is revealed that the acoustic modal analysis can accurately predict global noise at a small computational cost. Moreover, a parametric study was conducted to evaluate the effect of different configurations on the global noise. The mechanism of phase synchronization method was analyzed comprehensively at the same time. Lastly, experiments were carried out in the anechoic chamber to validate the method proposed. When the separation distance between rotor shafts is greater than 2.8 R, the aerodynamic interference between the rotors can be ignored and the method can be well applied globally. Otherwise, the aerodynamic interference result in predictions that do not match the experiments at higher elevation angles, e.g. 60°. Meanwhile, as the elevation angle decreases, the prediction error decreases rapidly.

Nano-FTIR Correlation Nanoscopy for Organic and Inorganic Material Analysis

Significance: Correlation scanning probe techniques to complement nanoscale IR measurements for next generation sample characterizationScattering-type Scanning Near-field Optical Microscopy (s-SNOM) is a scanning probe approach to optical microscopy and spectroscopy, bypassing the ubiquitous diffraction limit of light to achieve a spatial resolution below 20 nanometers. s-SNOM employs the strong confinement of light at the apex of a sharp metallic atomic force microscopy (AFM) tip to create a nanoscale optical hot-spot. Analyzing the scattered light from the tip enables the extraction of the optical properties of the sample directly below the tip and yields nanoscale resolved images simultaneous to topography [1]. In addition, the technology has been advanced to enable Fourier-Transform Infrared Spectroscopy on the nanoscale (nano-FTIR) [2] using broadband radiation from the visible spectral range to THz frequencies.Recently, the combined analysis of complex nanoscale material systems by correlating near-field optical data with information obtained by other scanning probe microscopy (SPM)-based measurement methodologies has gained significant interest. For example, the material-characteristic nano-FTIR spectra of a phase-separated polystyrene/low-density polyethylene (PS/LDPE) polymer blend verifies sharp material interfaces by measuring a line profile across a ca. 1 μm sized LDPE island. Near-field reflection/absorption imaging at 1500cm-1 of the ca. 50nm thin film allows to selectively highlight the distribution of PS in the blend and simultaneously map the mechanical properties like adhesion of the different materials [3,4].Further, we present results that correlate the near-field optical response of semiconducting samples like graphene (2D) or functional SRAM devices (3D) in different frequency ranges (mid-IR & THz) to Kelvin Probe Force Microscopy (KPFM) measurements. Thus, s-SNOM systems represent an ideal platform to gain novel insights into complex material systems by different near-field and AFM-based method.[1] F. Keilmann, R. Hillenbrand, Phil. Trans. R. Soc. Lond. A 362, 787 (2004).[2] F. Huth, et al., Nano Lett. 12, 3973 (2012).[3] B. Pollard, et al., Beilstein J. of Nanotechn. 7, 605 (2016).[4] I. Amenabar, et al., Nature Commun. 8, 14402 (2017).

Spatiotemporal sampling of near-petahertz vortex fields

Measuring the field of visible light with high spatial resolution has been challenging, as many established methods only detect a focus-averaged signal. Here, we introduce a near-field method for optical field sampling that overcomes that limitation by employing the localization of the enhanced near-field of a nanometric needle tip. A probe field perturbs the photoemission from the tip, which is induced by a pump pulse, generating a field-dependent current modulation that can easily be captured with our electronic detection scheme. The approach provides reliable characterization of near-petahertz fields. We show that not only the spiral wavefront of visible femtosecond light pulses carrying orbital angular momentum (OAM) can be resolved but also the field evolution with time in the focal plane. Additionally, our method is polarization sensitive, which makes it applicable to vectorial field reconstruction.