About
The antenna group was established by C. Craeye, in 2002, after his 1999-2001 postdoctoral activity in The Netherlands and in the USA in the framework of the Square Kilometer Array project.
The first Ph.D. thesis of the group (X. Dardenne) started in September 2002 and was devoted to epsilon-near-zero metamaterial antennas. A number of other projects started in the 2003-2005 period, funded mainly by Région Wallonne, European Commission, FRIA and ESA. They concerned wide-band antennas, direction-finding systems, small antennas, metamaterials for medical imaging, numerical methods for ground observation and for dielectrics with arbitrary shapes, etc. The group now has graduated 14 PhD students and 7 other PhD theses are currently ongoing. Industrial collaborations are taking place with AGC-Glass-Europe, Thalès Communications, ICOMS Detections, and many small businesses, through collaborative projects and sometimes through direct contractual services. A 50-50 balance between numerical methods and systems is sought, the latter concerning mainly near-field imaging and direction-finding systems.
The key research themes are mutual coupling in antenna arrays and modal analysis in metamaterials. Within UCL, tight collaborations exist with the groups on Propagation, Signal processing, Microwave circuits and electronics. External collaborations involve the Universities of Cambridge, Siena, Bologna, Brussels, Sevilla, Institut Fresnel of Marseilles, etc.