Associate professor of electrical engineering in the Grove School of Engineering at The City College of New York, Dr. David Crouse, is leading the Center for Metamaterials, which is a collaboration between industry and academia. The project has received a five year grant from the National Science Foundation.
The City University of New York, Western Carolina University, University of North Carolina at Charlotte and Clarkson University are the other partners in the project. Fifteen corporate houses, such as Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, Corning and Goodrich, will also be represented at the center. In its first year of operation the center will receive $230,000 from the NSF, with an additional $40,000 from each company.
Preliminary researchers included Dr. Myron Wecker and Dr. John Blaho of the CUNY Center for Advanced Technology and CUNY Vice Chancellor for Research Gillian Small. Dr. Weiguo (Bill) Wang, assistant professor of electrical engineering, Western Carolina, University; Dr. Michael O. Fiddy, professor of physics and optical science and electrical and computer engineering, University of North Carolina at Charlotte and Dr. S.V. Babu, professor, Clarkson University were other members of the team. Professor Crouse says metamaterials are used in cloaking products, allowing light to wrap itself around an object, making it almost invisible to the naked eye.
The research will focus on Materials for rapid prototyping, metamaterial building blocks, all-dielectric resonator metamaterials, development of modeling and design algorithms, process development of composite materials, aperture and cavity arrays, tools for characterization of metamaterials, metallic resonator metamaterials and zero or negative Refractive Index Materials. The fields of renewable energy and sensors will also be studied.
Three current projects include development of metamaterials for a hydrogen-powered production device, biofuel-powered generation and splitting light that could be beamed on target sites on a device.
Source: http://www2.ccny.cuny.edu