Fun with eutectic metals - Galinstan

I have been doing lots of full-wave electromagnetic simulation as part of my PhD and most of these techniques are applied for antenna design (as opposed to backscatter estimation for very complex targets i.e. forests). So naturally I decided sideways into antenna theory and started exploring malleable liquid antennas. These antennas have the advantage of taking strain and being easy to electro-mechanically tune and fit to a lot of form factors solid metal antennas cannot cope with.

The dominant material in liquid antennas is Galinstan - the mongrel made from Gallium, Indium and Stannum (well Tin). It sounds like some country in Asia Minor, next to Afganistan and Pakistan, but in fact it occupies a spot somewhere near Hydrargyrum (Mercury) in electrical and thermal properties. It is also not as toxic as Mercury, which caused the Mad Hatter and Isaac Newton to become rather eccentric.

Galinstan is apparently also rather useful for its ability to generate electricity when compressed, rather like piezo crystals. This has led to applications in the infamous heel/toe strike device, with patent holders claiming upto 10w per foot. I am sure the shoe phone is not far away.

Swarm MIMO and cognitive antenna creation on the "Fly"

Looking at the skybotix and talking to folks in the lab about GPS jammer direction of arrival and null-steering to locate and isolate jammer - I considered building a flock bot to produce reconfigurable GPS antijamming arrays. The GPS antennas are typically omni-directional and pick up the signal as well as strong jammers. A flock antenna can easily locate jammers by producing spherical antenna arrays on demand to detect and null jammers. A perfect example of what a group of objects can do when individuals fail. The 3D array configuration can then change from detection mode to nulling mode where the array reforms to steer the most effcient nulls. The whole swarm gains by receiving GPS position and sharing the information via difficult to jam short-distance communication such as bluetooth.

The tricky bits now would be to build the relocation and swarm shaping without collision. The swarm has to collectively agree on the position of the elements and plan paths while observing the RF environment. Sounds tricky but if bees can do it, we can too.