Chenchen Li, a graduate student from the University of Texas at Austin has taken the first prize in the 2013 FEKO Student Competition. Chenchen's research was motivated by significant concerns in the radar community about the rapidly growing number of wind farms. His supervisor, Dr Hao Ling, Professor of Electrical Engineering and holder of the L. B. (Preach) Meaders Professorship in Engineering, received the supervisor prize.

In his presentation entitled Dynamic Radar Signatures of Wind Turbines – Simulation and Measurement, he gave a thorough description of his work involving FEKO. In his studies so far he has investigated the dynamic backscattering of a single small wind turbine. His approach was to use FEKO's Physical Optics solver to simulate a spinning wind turbine and to verify the results through in situ measurements of the small wind turbine with a commercially available radar module.

He performed post-processing on the simulated field results to present the dynamic signatures by means of sinograms, spectograms and ISAR images, clearly explaining what can be observed from each of these diagrams. He also combined ISAR snapshots to create a composite radar image of the turbine.

This year's FEKO Student Competition was dominated by entries from American universities. Although students from other countries submitted engaging entries, three students studying at the University of Texas at Austin and The Ohio State University made a clean sweep of the prizes.

In second place was Ezdeen Elghannai from The ElectroScience Laboratory at The Ohio State University who submitted; Systematic Design of Dual-Band Antenna for Wireless Applications using the Theory of Characteristic Modes. Ming Chen, also from the ElectroScience Laboratory at The Ohio State University where he is pursuing his PhD claimed the third prize with his entry; Characterization of Pedestrian Electromagnetic Scattering Features at 76–77 GHz.

“We are very pleased with the quality of entries we have received this year, in our 11th competition and we are committed to supporting engineering education worldwide,” said Gronum Smith, Director & Marketing Team Leader at EMSS.