Accessible communications are becoming an important part of most people's everyday life. Both business and private users increasingly expect to be able to contact people and get information from any location, not just while at the office or workplace. The incredible success of the mobile phone has further increased the expectations of users in this area. To cater for this demand, a new generation of connectivity possibilities based on wireless local area networks (LAN's) named Wi-Fi is being established.Wi-Fi, or Wireless Fidelity allows you to connect to the Internet from your chair at home, a bed in a hotel room or a conference room at work without wires. Wi-Fi is a wireless technology like a cell phone. Wi-Fi enabled computers send and receive data indoors and out; anywhere within the range of a base station. It's several times faster than the fastest cable modem connection and is rapidly being installed in many locations, such as corporate facilities, in airports, hotels, coffee shops and other public areas equipped with Wi-Fi access. Wireless networking is expanding to longer range outdoor systems as well via WiMax. Wi-Fi and WiMax are based upon an Industry standard technology known as IEEE 802. This is relatively easy and inexpensive to implement and is being widely deployed in many public areas and commercial settings. It has been estimated that over 30 million Wi-Fi cards would ship in 2004 illustrating the impressive rate of growth of this technology. Wireless LAN transmissions can thus be viewed as a future, widely available local area signal. Apart from the communications aspect, these signals have the potential to be used for other purposes. Particularly of interest is the possibility of detecting objects and people using the principles of Radar. In conventional Radar pulses are transmitted and received by the same equipment. In its simplest form this allows the user to detect whether a target is present and how far away from the radar it is by the time delay before the pulse is returned. IF the transmitter and receiver are separated then the processing is slightly more complex but the basic principles still apply. Using wireless LAN transmissions for this purpose could lead to the development of a surveillance capability from a ubiquitous and accessible source. All the transmissions would already be available and a relatively simple receiver system could be designed to carry out this task. There are, of course, many problems to be overcome in applying these relatively simple principles in a real world situation. The proposed full research programme will examine the problems in the context of these initial results and aim to demonstrate that a surveillance system based on wireless networks is a viable alternative and addition to existing systems. The integration of this technique with one existing system (video camera) will also be examined. Such a combination could provide a powerful tool to detect for example anomalous or suspicious behaviour. UCl have already started an initial feasibility study of the technique with promising results and basic target detection capability has already been established. This project addresses a completely new area. Successful development of this technology would result in a major advance in local area detection. Such a system would complement ongoing research into other local area detection techniques such as those using mobile phone systems and RFID tagging. This technique could be used for many purposes including improving internal and external security in private and public areas and identification and tracking of goods and people. Particular applications could be in crime reduction, terrorist threat mitigation and stolen goods detection and tracking.

Electromagnetic modelling is an essential tool for electromagnetic compatibility characterisation of electrical equipment. All electrical equipment must satisfy international standards for electromagnetic compatibility (EMC) to ensure that it does not interfere with other equipment or is susceptible to external interference. The use of simulation software greatly reduces the design and development of new equipment that confirms compliance to EMC standards, so it is widely used throughout the electrical industry. The increasing processor clock signal speeds and the decreasing size of electronic devices has made electromagnetic simulation very demanding. It is not possible to fully model the complexity of electronic devices with full 3D electromagnetic simulators. Some form of simplification of the electronic devices is required. A recent EPSRC funded project by the George Green Institute for Electromagnetics Research has developed a way of characterising the electromagnetic emissions from printed circuit boards (PCBs) using near field scan data so that a simplified model of their behaviour can be constructed. The produced models have been demonstrated to be suitable for use in electromagnetic simulators. This work was very successful and achieved all the project objectives, but was only demonstrated on simple PCB structures and in the frequency domain. For this method to be fully incorporated in the industrial sector, however, it needs to encompass all common PCB structures, their interconnects and be extended into a time domain approach. This proposal will research extending the techniques developed so far using near field scans of PCBs so that it can provide simplified models of all common types of PCBs and include their interconnects and a way of combining their characteristics into complete system models. The work will also look at ways of extending the method into the time domain. In this was it is hoped that models suitable for use in full 3D electromagnetic simulators can be developed to enable engineers to provide EMC characterisation at the design stage.

In this proposal we will design, fabricate and employ a novel multiple materials additive manufacturing (MMAM) equipment to enable us to make optical fibre preforms (both in conventional and microstructured fibre geometries) in silica and other host glass materials. In existing low-loss fibre preform fabrication methods, based on either chemical vapour deposition technique for conventional solid index guiding fibres or 'stack and draw' process for micro-structured fibre, it is very difficult to control composition in 3D. Our proposed MMAM can be utilised to produce complex preforms, which is otherwise too difficult or time consuming or currently impossible to achieve by the existing fabrication techniques. This will open up a route to manufacture novel fibre structures in silica and other glasses for a wide range of applications, covering from telecommunications, sensing, lab-in-a-fibre, metamaterial fibre, to high-power laser, and subsequently we are expected to gain significant economic growth in the future.

Abstracts are not currently available in GtR for all funded research. This is normally because the abstract was not required at the time of proposal submission, but may be because it included sensitive information such as personal details.