Land mine detection using a ground-penetrating radar based on resistively loaded Vee dipoles

Resistively loaded Vee dipoles are considered for use in a short-pulse ground penetrating radar (GPR) used to detect buried antipersonnel land mines. First, a study is made to select a short pulse to radiate that is most appropriate for the problem. A simple one-dimensional (1-D) analysis of some representative soils and a land mine is used to select a radiated pulse similar in shape to a differentiated Gaussian pulse with a spectral peak at 4 GHz. Based on previous studies, the conductivity of the arms of the Vee dipole is linearly tapered from the feed to the open ends. A fully three-dimensional (3-D) finite-difference time domain (FDTD) model is developed and used to simulate the GPR land mine detection problem. Using this model, a resistively loaded Vee dipole is selected and evaluated. Parametric studies related to the problem are conducted including: varying the height of the Vee above the ground, varying the position of the land mine both laterally and in depth, and examining the effects of the geometry of the land mine on the received signal. Environmental conditions are examined including signal returns from rocks and variations in the shape of the surface of the ground. The FDTD results are validated by comparisons with experimental data. These studies demonstrate that resistively loaded Vee dipoles can greatly reduce clutter related to the antenna, making the task of distinguishing land mines (targets) much easier.

[1]  K. Yee.  Numerical solution of initial boundary value problems involving maxwell's equations in isotropic media , 1966 .

[2]  J. E. Hipp.  Soil electromagnetic parameters as functions of frequency, soil density, and soil moisture , 1974 .

[3]  Ronold W. P. King,et al.  Antennas in Matter: Fundamentals, Theory, and Applications , 1981 .

[4]  S. Nelson,et al.  Dielectric properties of selected minerals at 1 to 22 GHz , 1989 .

[5]  Waymond R. Scott,et al.  The use of emulsions to represent dielectric materials in electromagnetic scale models , 1990 .

[6]  D. Pozar.  Microwave Engineering , 1990 .

[7]  Waymond R. Scott,et al.  Measured electrical constitutive parameters of soil as functions of frequency and moisture content , 1992, IEEE Trans. Geosci. Remote. Sens..

[8]  R. Luebbers,et al.  The Finite Difference Time Domain Method for Electromagnetics , 1993 .

[9]  Boutros Boutros-Ghali,et al.  The Land Mine Crisis: A Humanitarian Disaster , 1994 .

[10]  James G. Maloney,et al.  A simple FDTD model for transient excitation of antennas by transmission lines , 1994 .

[11]  Jean-Pierre Berenger,et al.  A perfectly matched layer for the absorption of electromagnetic waves , 1994 .

[12]  Jin-Fa Lee,et al.  A perfectly matched anisotropic absorber for use as an absorbing boundary condition , 1995 .

[13]  John B. Schneider,et al.  A selective survey of the finite-difference time-domain literature , 1995 .

[14]  Allen Taflove,et al.  Computational Electrodynamics the Finite-Difference Time-Domain Method , 1995 .

[15]  Glenn S. Smith,et al.  VEE DIPOLES WITH RESISTIVE LOADING FOR SHORT-PULSE GROUND-PENETRATING RADAR , 1996 .

[16]  Richard W. Ziolkowski,et al.  How to design the imperfect berenger pml , 1996 .

[17]  Stephen D. Gedney,et al.  An Anisotropic PML Absorbing Media for the FDTD Simulation of Fields in Lossy and Dispersive Media , 1996 .

[18]  S. Gedney.  An anisotropic perfectly matched layer-absorbing medium for the truncation of FDTD lattices , 1996 .

[19]  T. P. Montoya,et al.  A study of pulse radiation from several broad-band loaded monopoles , 1996 .

[20]  R. E. King,et al.  A direct learning law for a class of auto-associative dynamic neural networks , 1998 .