PhD: Polarisation Diversity and Ultra-Wideband Antenna for Feature Extraction

This is a fully funded PhD project funded by the Defence Science Technology (DST) Missile Defence Centre (MDC), conducting low technology readiness level research. Recent advances in high speed digital technology make the direct digital synthesis and direct sampling of radio frequency (RF) waveforms an affordable and technically feasible proposition. This opens up the possibility of using pulses with wide instantaneous bandwidths over a number of different RF bands to extract target features for classification purposes.

The advent of ultra-wideband antennas with polarisation diversity adds another dimension to the toolkit that radar designers can work with, in that it permits a single radar to operate across a number of radar bands concurrently and with dual polar transmissions.

The PhD will investigate the potential of such waveforms to extract target features such as spin, tumble and precession of ballistic objects using signal processing techniques such as time-frequency transforms, combined with Machine Learning, to successfully classify objects in space. Crucially, it will investigate what combination of features extracted across the ultra-wide bandwidth of the antenna, with differing polarisations, will yield benefit when classifying space objects.

You will join the Ground-Based SAR laboratory team, undertaking both theoretical and experimental research. The PhD is industry-linked to BAE who will help supervise the project and provide you with the opportunity to spend twelve weeks working with BAE on-site.

Application deadline 04 January 2023

Award type(s) PhD

Start date 06 Feb 2023

Duration of award 3 years

Entry requirements

Applicants should have a 1st class or 2.1 UK Honours degree or equivalent in a relevant physics, mathematics or engineering subject

Funding

This project is fully funded and provides a stipend of £18,731 per year tax free (pro-rata for final four months). The full fees including AFE are covered

How to apply

For information about applications please contact: CDSAdmissionsoffice@cranfield.ac.uk