DEPARTMENT NEWS
Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE)
Bruno Osorno is working with the University of Minnesota as part of a three-year project titled “A Nationwide Consortium of Universities to Revitalize Electric Power Engineering Education by State-of-the-Art Laboratories.” Now in its second year, the consortium is making excellent progress. CSUN’s contribution will be a power electronics laboratory in CECS, with state-of-the-art equipment. Most of the equipment has been purchased and is in the testing phase; it will be ready for teaching by fall 2012. At the consortium’s annual conference, at the University of Minnesota, in August of 2011, Osorno gave a poster presentation about the CSUN laboratory. He would like to acknowledge the continuing support of his department chair, Ali Amini, and the dean of the college, S. K. Ramesh, in this ongoing effort.
Osorno also secured $5,000 from the campus IRA program to design and build a solar charging station for electric bicycles. This project will be carried out during the 2011-12 academic year.
Sembiam Rengarajan was appointed a distinguished lecturer by the IEEE Antennas and Propagation Society for 2010-12. He is one of nine distinguished lecturers appointed worldwide for this triennium. (For details, please see the CSUN press release issued June 8, 2011: https://blogs.csun.edu/news/2011/06/lecturer/.)
Rengarajan also received four awards from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) for contributions to the development of scientific or technical innovations. These include 1) “Coupling between Waveguide-Fed Slot Arrays”; 2) “Scanning and Defocusing Properties of Microstrip Reflectarray”; 3) “Design, Analysis, and Development of a Large Ka-Band Slot Array for Digital Beam-Forming Application”; and 4) “Excitation of a Parallel Plate Waveguide by an Array of Rectangular Waveguides.”
In addition, Rengarajan made a number of presentations at conferences. At the IEEE International Antennas and Propagation and USNC URSI Radio Science Meeting in Spokane, WA, in July 2011, he presented a co-authored paper titled “Ka band slot array antenna for interferometric synthetic aperture radar topographic mapping mission” and presented an invited paper in a special session on reflectarrays and transmit arrays titled “Investigation of Microstrip Reflectarrays for Non Broadside Beams.”
He also chaired a technical session on Slotted, Guided and Leaky-Wave Antennas at the IEEE APS/URSI Symposium; presented an invited presentation titled “Innovations in Antenna Design” at the IEEE New Technology Conference at Boeing Corporation in Seal Beach, CA, in August 2011 and the same month presented a paper titled “Theory of a Traveling Wave Feed for a Planar Slot Array Antenna” at the XXX triennial International Union of Radio Science (URSI) General Assembly and Scientific Symposium in Istanbul, Turkey.
Manufacturing Systems Engineering and Management (MSEM)
Robert Dale Conner is the coauthor of a paper titled “Effect of processing on Charpy impact toughness of metallic glass matrix composites” that was published in the Journal of Materials Research. In the study reported on in the paper, Charpy impact testing was used to investigate the effect of processing history and dendrite morphology of bulk metallic glass matrix composites (BMGMCs) on impact toughness. Composite samples were fabricated via suction casting and semisolid forging, and the results were compared with crystalline alloys in the same geometry. A strong dependence on processing was observed, with samples exhibiting up to a 30-fold increase in impact toughness depending on processing and microstructure. Provided that attention is paid to processing techniques, BMGMCs are shown to have properties that equal or surpass some conventionally used crystalline alloys. These properties invite further exploration of these materials in structural applications.
Conner was also jointly issued a patent last May for a process for joining materials using bulk metallic glasses. The patent covers methods and compositions for a novel metal-to-metal or material-to-material joining technique using bulk metallic glasses. The method makes it possible to join a variety of materials at a much lower temperature than typical ranges used for soldering, brazing or welding.
Ileana Costea became the new MSEM department chair in August 2011. Costea is a professor of engineering automation/MSE and has been at CSUN since 1979.
Kaveh Houshmand Azad has been appointed to the 2011 Board of Examiners for the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award. The award, created by public law in 1987, is the highest level of national recognition for performance excellence that a U.S. organization can receive. The board is composed of approximately 500 leading experts selected from industry, professional and trade organizations, education and health care organizations, nonprofits and government. As an examiner, Kaveh is responsible for reviewing and evaluating applications submitted for the Baldrige Award, which may be given annually in each of six categories: manufacturing, service, small business, education, health care and nonprofit.
In fall 2009, engineering management professors Ahmad Sarfaraz and Mark Rajai participated in a joint project involving faculty and students from CSUN and the University of Louisville, based on integrating two culminating experience courses. 
This collaboration resulted in a paper co-authored by Feysal Montazeri, an EM/MSEM graduate student, and professors Sarfaraz and Rajai, that was recently published in the highly selective print and online journal International Journal of Technology Interface. This type of project benefits students as well as faculty and enhances the reputation of the CECS engineering management graduate program. In March 2010, Sarfaraz and Rajai started discussions to establish a collaboration between EM/MSEM and the Grenoble Ecole de Management University in France to offer CSUN students the opportunity to obtain a Ph.D. in engineering management.