ECE Ph.D. student Milad Frounchi has received the 2020 MTT-Sat Challenge Award.
Milad Frounchi has received the 2020 MTT-Sat Challenge Award. Managed by the IEEE Microwave Theory and Techniques Society, the MTT-Sat Challenge is a worldwide competition that is for teams of undergraduate and graduate students to design and build radio frequency (RF) and microwave hardware for small satellites. The most promising designs will undergo space environmental qualification testing and will be incorporated in a CubeSat and launched into orbit.
A Ph.D. student in the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE), Frounchi is advised by John Cressler, who holds the Schlumberger Chair in Electronics. Frounchi received the bachelor's degree (with honors) from the University of Tabriz, Iran, in 2012, and the master's degree from the Sharif University of Technology, Iran, in 2014.
Quantifying and predicting climatological changes in atmospheric temperature has been identified as a critical earth science need in several major studies. However, lower-to-middle tropospheric temperature trends of climatological origin are of order as low as ~0.16oC/decade, and high-performance radiometers are needed to observe these trends.
Frounchi’s research is focused on designing RF and mm-wave integrated circuits for atmospheric sensing and providing a low SWaP-C solution for weather CubeSats. This research has been supported in part by the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) space initiative. In addition, Orbital MicroSystems has partnered with Georgia Tech to commercialize these mm-wave radiometers and deploy a constellation of weather satellites and supply the observed data products to government and commercial customers. This research has resulted in nine peer-reviewed publications and a U.S. patent.