Experimental detection of Brillouin precursors through tap water at microwave frequencies

Proposed is a simple technique to analyse Brillouin precursor waveforms propagating through a dispersive medium at microwave frequencies. The technique has been successfully used in modelling these precursors through 10 cm deep normal tap water using the experimental S -parameter data collected with a vector network analyser from 100 MHz to 2.5 GHz. The proposed technique is general enough to be applied on pulses of any type and shape and at any carrier frequency, within the constraints given by the bandwidth covered during the measurement stage. The pulse under consideration can be reconstructed using the software algorithms applied on the measured data, thereby simplifying the hardware needed to conduct the experiments.