The development of millimeter wave systems is driven by the strong trend toward new communications generations and especially by the emerging joint radar and communications design approach. Safety-critical applications like platooning or intersection assistance will significantly benefit from the combination of sensing and communications. While radar performs a channel measurement and thus, needs a wide field of view (especially in city/intersection scenarios), communications aims to minimize the interference for other not addressed receivers (e. g. in a platoon) by a focused antenna design. The proposed work extends the analysis of the influence of various antenna positioning for a typical automotive scene by taking also different characteristics (antenna gain, half power beamwidth, and sidelobe level) into account. Hereby, it is mandatory to investigate the communications and sensing performance simultaneously. The positions at the front bumper – typical for radar sensors – and especially at the left mirror convinced regarding the vehicular communications as well as the sensing behaviour. Applying focused antennas is promising, however, has also limits if the signals are not received out of the main beam but out of the sidelobes, resulting in a critical communications performance. Thus, beam steering is recommended to be applied in the future.

Magnetic nanoparticles offer numerous promising biomedical applications, e. g. magnetic drug targeting. Here, magnetic drug carriers inside the human body are directed towards tumorous tissue by an external magnetic field. However, the success of the treatment strongly depends on the amount of drug carriers, reaching the desired tumor region. This steering process is still an open research topic. In this paper, the previous study of a linear Halbach array is extended by an additional Halbach array with different magnetization angles between two adjacent magnets and investigated numerically using COMSOL Multiphysics. The Halbach arrays are arranged with permanent magnets and generate a relatively large region of a moderately homogeneous, high magnetic field while having a strong gradient. This results in a strong magnetic force, trapping many particles at the magnets. Afterwards, to avoid particle agglomeration, the Halbach array is flipped to its weak side. Therefore, the magnetic flux density, its gradient and the resulting magnetic force are computed for the different Halbach arrays with different constellations of magnetization directions. Since the calculation of the gradient can lead to high errors due to the used mesh in Comsol, the gradient was derived analytically by investigating two different fitting functions. Overall, the array with a 90° shifted magnetization performs best, changing the magnetic sides of the array easily and deflecting more particles. Besides, the results revealed that the magnetic force dominates directly underneath the magnets compared to the other existing forces on the SPIONS. Summarized, the results depict that the magnetic force and, thus, the region where the particles are able to get washed out, can be adjusted using low-cost permanent magnets.

Testbeds are required to assess concepts and devices in the context of molecular communication. These allow the observation of real-life phenomena in a controlled environment and therefore present the basis of future work. A testbed using superparamagnetic iron oxide nanoparticles (SPIONs) as information carriers was constructed with regard to this context and requires a sensitive receiver for the detection of SPIONs. This paper focusses on the comparison between a newly presented device (inductance sensor), a previously constructed SPION sensor (resonance bridge), and a commercial susceptometer as reference. The new inductance sensor is intended to improve on a low sensitivity achieved with the previous device and restrictions with respect to sample rate and measurement aperture encountered with the susceptometer. The signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) for each device is assessed at a variety of SPION concentrations. Furthermore, the sensors bit error rates (BER) for a random bit sequence are determined. The results show the device based on an inductance sensor to be the most promising for further investigation as values both for BER and SNR exceed those of the resonance bridge while providing a su?ciently high sample rate. On average the SNR of the new device is 13 dB higher while the BER for the worst transmission scenario is 9% lower. The commercial susceptometer, although returning the highest SNR, lacks adaptability for the given use case.

In this paper, the design of a microwave based noninvasive glucose sensor at the operating frequency of 19 GHz is presented. Worldwide, about 451 million adults suffer from diabetes. For optimal therapy, people with diabetes should monitor their blood glucose level continuously over the day. For that purpose non-invasive microwave based glucose sensors are under research. Non-invasive microwave based glucose sensors must automatically perform continuous measurements with a high and stable accuracy. However, there exists no reliable noninvasive microwave based glucose sensor up to now. The proposed sensor is designed based on a two-port microstripline (MSL) network. Water with various glucose concentration from 0 to 500 mg/dl is placed in a slot between the two ports. The simulation results show that the phase change in the reflection coefficient for the various glucose concentration depends on the matching. The measurement of the glucose concentration 10 mg/dl can be realized by applying a taper ground plane as a matching technique decreasing reflections at the interface between the microstripline substrate and the water. The proposed sensor achieves a sensitivity of 2 ° phase change per 10 mg/dl glucose concentration variation. In the future, the simulation results should be validated in an experimental setup.