Congratulations to Trent Moritz, the first CNDE-GRA recipient! This prestigious award, recognizes our best graduate students at ISU who are pursuing a Ph.D. degree in an area directly related to NDE and who perform their research at CNDE. The CNDE-GRA appointment will provide him up to three years of support (stipend, fringe benefits, tuition, and additional supplementary funds).
Details of the CNDE-GRA, for students interested in pursuing.
A dedication and plaque unveiling for Donald O. Thompson was recently held in the Applied Sciences Complex II lobby.
Don worked tirelessly to promote NDE and his perseverance peaked with the development of the Center for Nondestructive Evaluation (CNDE) at Iowa State University.
Several speakers were on hand at the dedication to say a few words about Don.
From left to right: Reza Zoughi – Center Director, Don Palmer, and Ann Thompson
Center for Nondestructive Evaluation (CNDE) has just acquired a new terahertz (THz) continuous-wave (CW) spectrometer, manufactured by Bakman Technologies (www.bakmantechnologies.com). This spectrometer employs precisely-tuned, fiber-coupled semiconductor lasers, photo-mixing source and detector, and digital control hardware and software to provide a fully turnkey THz spectroscopic system. Starting at a minimum of 75 GHz, it can sweep over 1.8 THz bandwidth in a single scan. The best frequency resolution of 100 MHz is a significant improvement over the existing THz pulsed systems. The CW nature of the photo-mixing source efficiently concentrates the THz power at the frequency of interest, yielding excellent signal-to-noise ratios (S/N) up to 70 dB across the scan range. The system is also portable, lightweight, and compact with book-size footprint, as shown.
The addition of this new CW THz system will further enhance CNDE’s capability in THz spectroscopy for material characterization in a number of areas including: the automotive, aviation, food, energy, materials, pharmaceuticals, medical diagnosis, forensics, defense, homeland security, and additive manufacturing (AM).
CNDE has acquired the Phased Array Company “Pioneer” System – a top of the line instrument for research in Ultrasonic NDE and more. “This unit, as configured, has a high channel count (larger array capability), ultra-high-speed throughput (GB’s per second), operating in phased array mode (beam forming and steering) or Full Matrix Capture/Total Focusing Mode (FMC/TFM) modes, or as single element probe on multi-channels. The unit was delivered with a suite of software development kits (SDK’s, in Python, flavors of C, MATLAB, LabView, etc.) allowing users to develop control and data acquisition applications using the codes with which they are most familiar. The first application of the unit will be in the mapping of the field of a phased array probe propagating through a highly complex surface for crack detection, ranging and sizing.” – says Mr. Dan Barnard, a research scientist at CNDE. This acquisition was made possible by a College of Engineering initiative to “Enhance Research Capabilities”, and other internal resources.
Farzaneh Ahmadi
, a Ph.D. candidate in the Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECpE) Department who conducts her research at CNDE, received the Student Best paper Award – Runner Up (2nd Place) at the American Society for Nondestructive Testing (ASNT) Research Symposium held in St. Louis, MO on June 20-23, 2022. Her paper titled: “High-Resolution Millimeter-Wave Near-Field Evaluation of Additive Manufactured (AM) Polymeric Structures” was co-authored with M.T. Al Qaseer and R. Zoughi.
Anna Case, a Ph.D. candidate in the Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECpE) Department who conducts her research at CNDE, received the Student Best paper Award – Runner Up (2nd Place) at the IEEE International Instrumentation and Measurement Technology Conference (I2MTC) held in Ottawa, Canada on May 16-19, 2022. Her paper titled: “Lossy Flange for Open-Ended Rectangular Waveguide Materials Characterization” was co-authored with A. McCarville, M.T. Al Qaseer and R. Zoughi.
Matthew Dvorsky, a Ph.D. candidate in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, who has been engaged in microwave and millimeter wave NDE research at CNDE since fall 2019 was awarded his Ph.D. degree during the May 2022 commencement ceremony. Dr. Dvorsky’s dissertation title is “Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) Polarimetry Techniques for Nondestructive Evaluation (NDE)”. Dr. Dvorsky will remain at CNDE in the capacity of a Postdoctoral Research Associate, conducting multi-faceted research in the fields of microwave and millimeter wave nondestructive evaluation and high-resolution millimeter wave imaging system development.
Marshall Vaccaro completed his degree requirements in May 2022 with a thesis titled “Orthogonally Coded Array for High-Speed Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) Imaging.” Marshall has since accepted a position with the Aerospace Corporation in Chantilly, VA as a radar signal processing engineer.
Chao Liu earned his Ph.D. with a thesis titled “Influence of antenna pattern on synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imaging and complex permittivity extraction from images of multilayered media.” Chao has been hired by Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. as a Senior Engineer
Ted Mathews earned his Master’s with a thesis titled “Application of microwave synthetic aperture radar imaging to the detection of subsurface water ice on Mars.” Ted will be employed by Digital Receiver Technology Inc., a subsidiary of The Boeing Company as a Radio Frequency Hardware Design Engineer.
Congratulations to Marshall, Chao, and Ted!
