Imaging of buried utilities by ultra wideband sensory systems

Third-party damage to the buried infrastructure like natural gas pipelines, water distribution pipelines and fiber optic cables are estimated at $10 billion annually across the US. Also, the needed investment in upgrading our water and wastewater infrastructure over the next 20 years is estimated by Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) at$400 billion, however, non-destructive condition assessment technologies capable of providing quantifiable data regarding the structural integrity of our buried assets in a cost-effective manner are lacking. Both of these areas were recently identified several U.S. federal agencies as \u27critical national need\u27. In this research ultra wideband (UWB) time-domain radar technology was adopted in the development of sensory systems for the imaging of buried utilities, with focus on two key applications. The first was the development of a sensory system for damage avoidance of buried pipes and conduits during excavations. A sensory system which can be accommodated within common excavator buckets was designed, fabricated and subjected to laboratory and full-scale testing. The sensor is located at the cutting edge (teeth), detecting the presence of buried utilities ahead of the cutting teeth. That information can be used to alert the operator in real-time, thus avoiding damage to the buried utility. The second application focused on a sensory system that is capable of detecting structural defects within the wall of buried structures as well as voids in the soil-envelope encasing the structure. This ultra wideband sensory system is designed to be mounted on the robotic transporter that travels within the pipeline while collecting data around the entire circumference. The proposed approach was validated via 3-D numerical simulation as well as full-scale experimental testing

Enhanced Microwave Imaging of the Subsurface for Humanitarian Demining Applications

© Cranfield University 2020. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced without the written permission of the copyright ownerThis thesis presents a theoretical analysis and applied evaluation deploying ground penetrat ing radar (GPR) for landmine detection. An original contribution has been made in designing and manufacturing a light-weight, low-cost, fully polarimetric antenna system for GPR, enabling easy transportation and as sembly. This facilitates extensive use by various smaller communities in remote areas. By achieving the goal of supplying various smaller communities with advanced ground pene trating radar technology the technological standard of landmine detection can be improved beyond existing solutions such as metal detection or manual probing. The novel radar system itself allows detection of various subsurface targets of different shapes and sizes, metallic and non-metallic, in a number of different soils, such as sand, loam or gravel and therefore can be used in versatile environments. The GPR system has been realised by designing novel light-weight, 3D printed X-band horn antennas, manufactured from single piece plastic then copper electroplated. These an tennas are 50% lighter than their commercial equivalents. They are incorporated in an an tenna array as a group of four to allow full-polarimetric imaging of the subsurface. High resolution images of landmines and calibration targets were performed in the subsurface over an experimental sand test bed. For performing subsurface measurements in the near-field, four novel gradient-index (GRIN) lenses were designed and 3D printed to be incorporated in the apertures of the X band antennas. The improved target detection from these lenses was proven by scanning the test bed and comparing the imaging data of the antenna array with and without lenses attached. A rigorous theoretical study of different decomposition techniques and their effect on the imaging and detection accuracy for polarimetric surface penetrating data was performed and applied to the gathered imaging data to reliably isolate and detect subsurface targets. Studied decomposition techniques were Pauli decomposition parameters and Yamaguchi polarime try decomposition. It was found that it is paramount to use both algorithms on one set of subsurface data to detect all features of a buried target. A novel temporal imaging technique was developed for exploiting natural occurring changes in soil moisture level, and hence its dielectric properties. Contrary to the previously intro duced imaging techniques this moisture change detection (MCD) mechanism does not rely on knowledge of the used measurement setup or deploying clutter suppression techniques. This time averaged technique uses several images of a moist subsurface taken over a period while the moisture evaporates from the soil. Each image pixel is weighted by the phase change occurring over the evaporation period and a resulting B-scan image reveals the subsurface targets without surrounding clutter. Finally, a multi-static antenna set-up is examined on its capability for suppressing sur face clutter and its limitations are verified by introducing artificial surface clutter in form of pebbles to the scene. The resulting technique was found to suppress up to 30 The GPR antenna system developed in this thesis and the corresponding imaging tech niques have contributed to a significant improvement in subsurface radar imaging perfor mance and target discrimination capabilities. This work will contribute to more efficient landmine clearance in some of the most challenged parts of the world.Ph

Enhanced microwave imaging of the subsurface for humanitarian demining applications

© Cranfield University 2020. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced without the written permission of the copyright ownerThis thesis presents a theoretical analysis and applied evaluation deploying ground penetrating radar (GPR) for landmine detection. An original contribution has been made in designing and manufacturing a light-weight, low-cost, fully polarimetric antenna system for GPR, enabling easy transportation and assembly. This facilitates extensive use by various smaller communities in remote areas. By achieving the goal of supplying various smaller communities with advanced ground penetrating radar technology the technological standard of landmine detection can be improved beyond existing solutions such as metal detection or manual probing. The novel radar system itself allows detection of various subsurface targets of different shapes and sizes, metallic and non-metallic, in a number of different soils, such as sand, loam or gravel and therefore can be used in versatile environments. The GPR system has been realised by designing novel light-weight, 3D printed X-band horn antennas, manufactured from single piece plastic then copper electroplated. These antennas are 50% lighter than their commercial equivalents. They are incorporated in an antenna array as a group of four to allow full-polarimetric imaging of the subsurface. High resolution images of landmines and calibration targets were performed in the subsurface over an experimental sand test bed. For performing subsurface measurements in the near-field, four novel gradient-index (GRIN) lenses were designed and 3D printed to be incorporated in the apertures of the Xband antennas. The improved target detection from these lenses was proven by scanning the test bed and comparing the imaging data of the antenna array with and without lensesattached. A rigorous theoretical study of different decomposition techniques and their effect on the imaging and detection accuracy for polarimetric surface penetrating data was performed and applied to the gathered imaging data to reliably isolate and detect subsurface targets. Studied decomposition techniques were Pauli decomposition parameters and Yamaguchi polarimetry decomposition. It was found that it is paramount to use both algorithms on one set of subsurface data to detect all features of a buried target. A novel temporal imaging technique was developed for exploiting natural occurring changes in soil moisture level, and hence its dielectric properties. Contrary to the previously introduced imaging techniques this moisture change detection (MCD) mechanism does not rely on knowledge of the used measurement setup or deploying clutter suppression techniques. This time averaged technique uses several images of a moist subsurface taken over a period while the moisture evaporates from the soil. Each image pixel is weighted by the phase change occurring over the evaporation period and a resulting B-scan image reveals the subsurface targets without surrounding clutter. Finally, a multi-static antenna set-up is examined on its capability for suppressing surface clutter and its limitations are verified by introducing artificial surface clutter in form of pebbles to the scene. The resulting technique was found to suppress up to 30 The GPR antenna system developed in this thesis and the corresponding imaging techniques have contributed to a significant improvement in subsurface radar imaging performance and target discrimination capabilities. This work will contribute to more efficient landmine clearance in some of the most challenged parts of the world

Noise-based Transmit Reference Modulation:A Feasibility Analysis

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) receive huge research interest for a multitude of applications, ranging from remote monitoring applications, such as monitoring of potential forest fires, floods and air pollution, to domestic and industrial monitoring of temperature, humidity, vibration, stress, etc. In the former set of applications, a large number of nodes can be involved which are usually deployed in remote or inaccessible environments. Due to logistic and cost reasons, battery replacement is undesired. Energy-efficient radios are needed, with a power-demand so little that batteries can last the lifetime of the node or that the energy can be harvested from the environment. Coherent direct-sequence spread spectrum (DSSS) based radios are widely employed in monitoring applications, due to their overall resilience to channel impairments and robustness against interference. However, a DSSS rake receiver has stringent requirements on precise synchronization and accurate channel knowledge. To obviate the complexity of a coherent DSSS receiver, particularly for low data rate sensor networks, a DSSS scheme that has fast synchronization and possibly low power consumption, is much desired. In this regard, this thesis studies a noncoherent DSSS scheme called transmit reference (TR), which promises a simple receiver architecture and fast synchronization. In traditional TR, the modulated information signal is sent along an unmodulated reference signal, with a small time offset between them. In this thesis, we present and investigate a variant of TR, called noise-based frequency offset modulation (N-FOM), which uses pure noise as the spreading signal and a small frequency offset (instead of a time offset) to separate the information and reference signals. The detection is based on correlation of the received signal with a frequency-shifted version of itself, which collects the transmitted energy without compromising the receiver simplicity. Analytical expressions on performance metrics, supplemented by simulation results, improve understanding of the underlying mechanisms and provide insights into utility of N-FOM in low-power WSNs. In point-to-point line-of-sight (LOS) communication, it was observed that the communication scheme has a minimal utility. The energy-detector type of receiver mixes all in-band signals, which magnifies the overall noise. Particularly, the self-mixing of the transmitted signal also elevates the noise level, which increases with a further increase in the received signal energy. Therefore, for a fixed set of system parameters, the performance attains an asymptote with increasing transmission power. The phenomenon also establishes a non-monotonic relation between performance and the spreading factor. It was observed that a higher spreading factor in N-FOM is beneficial only in a high-SNR regime. After developing an understanding of the performance degrading mechanisms, few design considerations are listed. It is found that a suitable choice of the receiver front-end filter can maximize the SNR. However, the optimal filter depends on received signal and noise levels. A practically feasible – albeit suboptimal – filter is presented which gives close to the optimal performance. Next, timing synchronization is considered. The implications of synchronization errors are analyzed, and a synchronization strategy is devised. The proposed synchronization strategy has little overhead and can be easily implemented for symbol-level synchronization. The N-FOM LOS link model is extended to assess the performance degradation due to interference. Performance metrics are derived which quantify the effects of multiple-user interference, as well as that from external interferers, such as WiFi. Since the correlation operation mixes all in-band signals, the total interfering entities are quadratically increased. The research shows the vulnerability of N-FOM to interference, which makes it optimistic to operate in a crowded shared spectrum (such as the ISM 2.4\,GHz band). We also observe an upper limit on the number of mutually interfering links in a multiple access (MA) network, that can be established with an acceptable quality. The scheme is further investigated for its resilience against impairments introduced by a dense multipath environment. It is observed that despite the noise enhancement, the N-FOM system performs reasonably well in a non-line-of-sight (NLOS) communication. The detection mechanism exploits the multipath channel diversity and leads to an improved performance in a rich scattering environment. An analytical expression for outage probability is also derived. The results indicate that a healthy N-FOM link with very low outage probability can be established at a nominal value of the received bit SNR. It is also found that the choice of the frequency offset is central to the system design. Due to multiple practical implications associated with this parameter, the maximum data rate and the number of usable frequency offsets are limited, particularly in a MA NLOS communication scenario. The analysis evolves into a rule-of-thumb criterion for the data rate and the frequency offset. It is deduced that, due to its limited capability to coexist in a shared spectrum, N-FOM is not a replacement for coherent DSSS systems. The scheme is mainly suited to a low data rate network with low overall traffic, operating in an interference-free rich scattering environment. Such a niche of sensor applications could benefit from N-FOM where the design goal requires a simple detection mechanism and immunity to multipath fading

Étude d'un réseau de capteur UWB pour la localisation et la communication dans un environnement minier

Le jour n'est peut-être pas très loin où une mine pourra compter sur un système de communication sans fil pour échanger des données, transmettre des informations ou localiser des travailleurs dans le cas d'une activité normale ou en cas d'urgence. Au point de vue de la sécurité, un système de communications sans fil aurait l'avantage de localiser en temps réel un travailleur ou un engin. Les travailleurs se déplacent sans cesse dans une mine. Avec une technologie sans fil permanente, on pourrait localiser les personnes de manière relativement précise. Même en cas d'éboulement, avec une technologie adaptée, il serait possible de savoir où se trouve la personne en détresse. Notre travail de recherche s'inscrit dans la perspective du développement d'un réseau de capteurs ultra large bande (UWB) pour deux applications : l'aide à la radiolocalisation et l'extension du réseau de capteurs sans fil dans la mine. Cette étude est focalisée sur trois aspects. La première partie de notre étude consiste à étudier tous les problèmes reliés à la radiolocalisation dans la mine. Vue l'importance de cette application, nous avons mis en oeuvre un réseau de capteurs en tenant compte d'un futur déploiement dans la mine. La technologie utilisée repose sur la technologie ultra large bande. Comme il n'existe pas de travaux qui traitent ce genre de problèmes, nous avons commencé notre étude par une caractérisation du canal UWB dans les mines souterraines. Pour atteindre ces objectifs, plusieurs campagnes de mesure sur site (mine expérimentale) ont été menées. Nous sommes parvenus à une modélisation du canal de propagation et à avancer des recommandations pour aider au dimensionnement d'un réseau de capteurs dans ce type d'environnement. Dans la première partie, le but est d'étudier le problème de radiolocalisation avec les réseaux de capteurs. Notre scénario proposé serait de placer des capteurs sur chaque agent (mineur, engin). On suppose que chaque noeud (agent) qui circule à travers un réseau d'ancre maillé (déjà déployé), va extraire des informations de distance (en utilisant le critère de temps d'arrivée), ensuite il va utiliser un algorithme de positionnement distribué afin de déterminer sa propre position. Lors de cette partie nous avons aussi étudié quelques estimateurs cohérents et non-cohérents du temps d'arrivée. La caractérisation de l'erreur de mesure utilisant le temps d'arrivée dans un environnement minier a été aussi évaluée. Enfin, dans la dernière partie, nous avons analysé par simulations un déploiement d'un réseau de capteurs UWB ad hoc dans la mine. Nous avons choisi d'adopter une approche théorique afin d'évaluer les performances de cette configuration. Une conception intercouche pour un routage optimal a été étudiée. Nous avons utilisé la couche physique/réseau afin de minimiser l'énergie consommée lors de l'acheminement du données

Advanced Sensors for Real-Time Monitoring Applications

It is impossible to imagine the modern world without sensors, or without real-time information about almost everything—from local temperature to material composition and health parameters. We sense, measure, and process data and act accordingly all the time. In fact, real-time monitoring and information is key to a successful business, an assistant in life-saving decisions that healthcare professionals make, and a tool in research that could revolutionize the future. To ensure that sensors address the rapidly developing needs of various areas of our lives and activities, scientists, researchers, manufacturers, and end-users have established an efficient dialogue so that the newest technological achievements in all aspects of real-time sensing can be implemented for the benefit of the wider community. This book documents some of the results of such a dialogue and reports on advances in sensors and sensor systems for existing and emerging real-time monitoring applications

Design and Evaluation of Microwave Antennas for Abdominal Fat Measurement Systems

PhDAvailability of accurate, low cost and non-invasive devices for the measurement of abdominal fat is an important factor for early diagnosis of the obesity-related diseases. To achieve this, a wideband (WB) system was developed that includes the advantages of high range resolution due to the wide bandwidth (BW 0.5 GHz) and acceptable penetration depth due to the low centre frequency (1 – 3.5 GHz). For the pulse transmission, double-ridged horn (DRH) antennas were proposed because of their wide bandwidth, high gain, and impedance matching capability. Simulation studies suggested that optimal pulse focus and minimal interference to be introduced into the system by pyramidal- and elliptical-DRH, especially when extended to locate the antenna in the far-field region. Since these shapes are complex to manufacture, 3D printing was employed to fabricate low-cost antennas with high resolution. A further improvement in system performance as well as a reduction in system size was achieved by embedding the antenna in a high dielectric material, which further reduced the reflections caused by impedance differences. Previously proposed high dielectric materials such as Barium Titanate-based ceramics and canola oil were characterised during this study and combined with different percentages of Titanium Oxide to increase their dielectric constant, while retaining good conductivity. In addition, Paraffin was preferred over oil, as it has the same dielectric properties but solidifies at room temperature. Analyses were conducted based on a three-layer dielectric tissue model mimicking human tissue thicknesses. To measure the extent of the fat layer, a parameterised WB pulse was transmitted through the tissue model and its reflections were recorded. Evaluation metrics including the reflection coefficient were employed to investigate the pulse magnitude reduction and time of arrival at the fat layer. Results indicate that the proposed system is able to measure fat thickness with the accuracy within ±1 mm