Wadham Grad Student wins prize for Engineering Project

Wadham graduate student Daffodil Dhayaa (MEng Engineering Science, 2018) has been awarded this year's Motz Prize for Best Project in Electrical Engineering. The prize is awarded by the University's Department of Engineering Science.

Daffy's award is for her outstanding Final Year project which so far has led to a conference presentation, a patent application, and now, the Motz Prize 2022. A journal publication is also in the works.

She shares, "I am extremely honoured to be receiving the Motz Prize for my Master’s Project, and I am very grateful for the recognition I have received.

This year I have pushed the limits of my own curiosity and capabilities, and felt like a true scientist! I have thoroughly enjoyed working in the Metamaterials field and it has been particularly rewarding to make a breakthrough in a new field of research.

A huge thank you to my supervisor, Ekaterina Shamonina, for her unwavering support and guidance, and to the Engineering Department for this award."

Daffy's project consisted of employing an array of coupled resonant elements to localise metallic objects. She explains, "The arrangement of these coupled elements forms a ‘magnetoinductive waveguide’, which artificial waves [known as magnetoinductive waves] can travel along. These waves reflect off metallic objects nearby, and the properties and parameters of the reflections are used to deduce information about the object.

My project utilised time-domain reflections of magnetoinductive waves. I designed a model to obtain, refine, and analyse the signals, and finally to calculate properties about the environment surrounding the wave. I was able to verify my work experimentally in the Electronics Lab, and found my techniques provided significant improvements compared to existing methods in the field.

My project enabled accurate single and multiple defect localisation, which to the best of our knowledge has not been achieved before, opening up possibilities for real-time contactless monitoring of inhomogeneous conductive environments."

Wadham congratulates Daffy on the impressive achievement!