Bogdan Popa
Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering
Popa has worked for the last 15 years on the design, fabrication and characterization of metamaterials and metamaterial-enabled devices. His research interests revolve around studying wave phenomena in complex structures and leveraging this knowledge to manipulate waves in new and interesting ways. To this end he has experimentally demonstrated unique passive and active metamaterial-based beamformers, metamaterial-enabled passive acoustic holography, and metamaterial-enabled compressive sensing devices, the first broadband acoustic cloaking devices in air, and the first metamaterials exhibiting strong dynamic mass anisotropy. He also showed how active elements can be embedded in the metamaterial structure to produce acoustic and electromagnetic devices such as acoustic lenses and acoustic and electromagnetic unidirectional media. Prof. Popa’s group has the expertise to design complex metamaterial structures using an array of theoretical methods and numerical tools. His lab is equipped with custom made apparatus used to experimentally characterize the acoustic behavior of fabricated metamaterial samples by measuring the spatial-temporal sound distribution in a 3D volume around the samples. Research interests: Design, optimization, and dynamics of new generations of engineered materials (metamaterials) that allow improved control over the propagation of acoustic, elastic and electromagnetic waves with applications in biomedical engineering, telecommunications, aero- and underwater acoustics; noise control; smart materials; mechatronics.