Title: Hybrid Additive Manufacturing of Electromagnetic Actuators and Selective Radome Surfaces

Date: Wednesday, August 27th, 2025

Time: 1:00pm - 3:00pm ET

Location: MRDC 4211, or  Teams Link

Sebastian Mettes

Robotics Ph.D. Student

Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering

Georgia Institute of Technology

Committee:

• Dr. Ellen Yi Chen Mazumdar (advisor) – Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology
• Dr. Kenneth Allen (co-advisor) – Georgia Tech Research Institute, Advanced Concepts Laboratory
• Dr. Carolyn Seepersad – Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology
• Dr. Jun Ueda  – Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology
• Dr. Andrew F. Peterson – School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology

Abstract:

While significant research has been conducted towards developing high performance frequency selective and energy selective surfaces (FSS, ESS), due to the limitations of traditional manufacturing, most research is focused on planar structures with rectangular unit-cell elements. While using ESS and FSS to provide frequency and energy filtering over radio frequency (RF) sensors via the radome has clear benefits in terms of signal-to-noise ratios and sensor protection from high-energy bursts, non-planar or conformal radome structures are limited in their ability to take advantage of these FSS and ESS structures.

To overcome traditional manufacturing limitations, a novel hybrid additive manufacturing system for RF and electromechanical structures is presented. By including fused filament fabrication (FFF), direct-ink-write (DIW), and vacuum pick and place (PnP) toolheads, this system has demonstrated the ability to manufacture single-touch fully-3D-printed electric motor stators, electro-mechanical devices, and conformal FSS structures.

Enabled by the developed true-3D additive manufacturing techniques, this document proposes to design, manufacture, and validate a conformal ESS for RF applications. The central hypothesis is that energy-dependent transmission and reflection profiles of a conformal ESS can be preserved, relative to a planar ESS, by selecting novel non-rectangular or curvature-adaptive unit-cell structures.