GCIS TECHNOLOGY BRIEFING: Lockheed Martin Collaborates with Penn State on Metamaterials Breakthrough

ISSUED BY: GCIS Communications Command Center

SOURCE: Lockheed Martin

16February2011 2:52pmEST

GCIS TECHNOLOGY UPDATE:

NEWTOWN, Pa., February 15th, 2011 — Lockheed Martin (NYSE: LMT) has collaborated with The Pennsylvania State University to develop a breakthrough material that can significantly improve the performance of spacecraft antennas. The electromagnetic metamaterial is considered to be the first commercially viable product of its kind and is one of the first practical implementations of electromagnetic metamaterials that improves a real-world device.

Lockheed Martin’s University Research Initiative (URI) Program funded the initiative, which produced a metamaterial used in a horn-shaped satellite antenna. Leveraging a partnership spanning several years, the latest Lockheed Martin-Penn State collaboration combined concepts envisioned by Dr. Erik Lier of Lockheed Martin Space Systems Company with Penn State’s expertise. The collaborative effort was featured in a recent issue of Nature Materials, one of the world's most prestigious and highly cited science journals focused on all topics within the combined disciplines of materials science and engineering.

Metamaterials have properties not found in nature. Electromagnetic metamaterials, like the one developed by the Lockheed Martin-Penn State collaboration, are designed to interact with and control the way electromagnetic waves travel, enabling new devices with radically different and improved performance. Metamaterials can help make products smaller, which is important in space-based applications, and can also be less costly to manufacture.

“Many experts within government, industry and academia, have had doubts about electromagnetic metamaterials because they were perceived to have narrow bandwidth and high loss,” said Lier. “The results we achieved in this collaborative effort challenged this paradigm, and I think we’ll see customers benefitting from this technology in the near-term.”

Prof. Doug Werner, director of the Penn State Computational Electromagnetics and Antennas Research Lab (PSU CEARL: http://cearl.ee.psu.edu/), led a team of students and scholars that developed the design optimization tools. They also successfully built and, along with Lockheed Martin, tested the first prototype antenna. (read full report)

About METAMATERIALS:

Naturally occurring matter exhibits behavior based on the molecules that make it up — the atomic material that composes the finished product determines what properties the product will have. For instance, take the relationship between wood and light. Wood, like all natural matter, reflects and refracts light. But just how much light it reflects and refracts depends on how the electromagnetic waves of the light interact with the particles — like electrons — that make up the wood.

With metamaterials, the sum of the parts, not the parts themselves, determines how the material behaves. Researchers have found that by using certain materials — like gold and copper arranged in certain patterns and shapes — they can combine the properties of those materials. In other words, unlike natural matter, metamaterials' behavior depends on the properties of the materials that make it up and the way the materials are put together. (read more)

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