Guillermo Álvarez-Narciandi of Queen’s University Belfast

The development of radio frequency technology and tracking systems have enabled the development of compact portable systems for both electromagnetic imaging and characterization. This talk will provide an overview of conventional state-of-the-art imaging and antenna characterization systems, highlighting their features and limitations, and will present some emerging portable alternatives. The talk will focus on handheld systems and, more specifically, on freehand applications, which rely on the use of a compact device moved by hand whose position is tracked to enable the coherent processing of the acquired data, bypassing the need of bulky positioning equipment. In particular, different freehand imaging prototypes using millimeter-wave radar-on-chip modules will be presented, showing their capability to produce high-resolution real-time images of the area under inspection. In addition, two different freehand systems for antenna diagnosis and characterization will be discussed. The first alternative relies on amplitude and phase near-field acquisitions of the field radiated by the antenna under test, providing real-time diagnosis and far-field information. The second approach, validated through measurements from Ka band up to 300 GHz, is based on amplitude-only acquisitions, enabling the assessment of onboard antennas under operational conditions.

Biography:

Guillermo Álvarez-Narciandi (Member, IEEE) received the M.Sc. degree in telecommunication engineering and the Ph.D. degree from the University of Oviedo, Spain, in 2016 and 2020, respectively.

From 2013 to 2022, he was with the Signal Theory and Communications Research Group, TSC-UNIOVI, University of Oviedo. He was a Visiting Student with Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA, in 2014, and a Visiting Scholar with the University of Pisa, Pisa, Italy, in 2018, and the Institute of Electronics, Microelectronics and Nanotechnology, University of Lille, Lille, France, in 2019. In 2022, he joined Queen’s University Belfast, Belfast, U.K., where he is currently a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) Research Fellow with the Centre for Wireless Innovation. He has authored more than 60 peer-reviewed journals and conference papers, and he holds two patents. His research interests include radar systems and imaging techniques, computational imaging, antenna diagnosis and characterization systems, localization and attitude estimation systems, and RFID technology.

Dr. Álvarez-Narciandi has received the Antenna Measurement Techniques Association (AMTA) 2019 Student Paper Award (Second Place), a MyGalileoDrone 4th prize awarded by the European Global Navigation Satellite Systems Agency (GSA) in March, 2021, and the Special Award to the Best Entrepreneurship Initiative in the XV Arquímedes National Contest, for the development of an RFID-based location system, in 2017. He has been appointed as 2024 Young Professional Ambassador of the IEEE Antennas and Propagation Society.

Email:

Address:MSCA Research Fellow,The Institute of Electronics, Communications and Information Technology, School of Electronics, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Queen’s University Belfast, Belfast, United Kingdom