Mission

Electromagnetic field theory is the primary research and education area in the REFTAS laboratory. Applications in electrical engineering such as RFID and wireless communication in harsh environments are studied. The REFTAS laboratory is a pioneer in theory and potential applications of electromagnetic interference including: countermeasures involving microwave technology, antenna structures, rough surface scattering, absorber geometry/ materials, reduction of radar cross sections, and communication integrity of Unmanned Air Systems in harsh electromagnetic environments.

The graduate and post-graduate level courses give students a deep insight into the various analysis methods and calculation techniques of electromagnetic fields in these areas of interest. Research in the REFTAS lab is conducted by both faculty and graduate students. While this research is primarily theory oriented, experimental analysis and software development tasks are carried out as needed and required to explore the state of the art of electromagnetic theory.

Resources

• Facilities

  80 MHz Reverberation chamber (EMC Characterization from 80 MHz to 20 GHz)

  Fully absorber lined anechoic chamber (8.5 meter - Antenna characterization from 30 MHz to 20 GHz)

  1- 2 GHz, 50 Watt amplifier

  Pre-amplifier (100 KHz to 3 GHz)

  Suite of VNAs and Spectrum analyzers (we can list model numbers and frequency ranges

  • Vector Network Analyzer (Agilent 8722ES, 50 MHz‐40 GHz)
  • Spectrum Analyzer (Agilent 4407B, 9 kHz‐26.5 GHz)
  • Vector Network Analyzer (HP 8753ES, 50 MHz‐6 GHz)
  • Vector Signal Analyzer (Agilent 89441A DC‐2650 MHz)
  • Signal Generator (Agilent E4437B 250KHz‐4 GHz)

• Software
  • FEKO - full suite
  • Antenna Magus
  • COMSOL Multiphysics
  • COSMOS
  • Sonnet
  • Advanced Design System by Agilent/Keysight
• Computational Capability

  The core of the REFTAS laboratory computational resources are four Intel quad-core Core I7 computational nodes each with 16 GB of RAM each and an Intel quad-core Core2 node with 8 gigabytes of RAM. Each node is is running a Linux environment and is operating in parallel as a Beowulf cluster using the MPI message passing protocol. This cluster is supported by numerous Intel Pentium and Core2 class workstations running both the Linux and Microsoft Windows operating systems. Additional computational time is also available on the Oklahoma State University High Performance Computing Center cluster of 512 compute cores with 1024 GB of RAM running the Linux operating system in a Beowulf cluster using the MPI message passing protocol.