Numerical Modelling of Commercial GPR Antennas

The use of Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) has become widespread in a range of fields - civil engineering, geophysics, environmental engineering, archaeology, and remote sensing. This has led to the development of increasingly sophisticated GPR models to help progress understanding of how to detect, interpret and identify buried objects. The transmitter and receiver antenna(s) are a key component of any GPR system, but are often not accurately described and therefore not well modelled in many GPR simulators. This research aims to improve understanding and interpretation of GPR signal attributes, by incorporating accurate descriptions of commercially used antennas into GPR models. A methodology is demonstrated for creating 3D FDTD models of two real GPR antennas. It is shown that when the, often complex, geometry is accurately represented in the FDTD model, a good agreement can be obtained between the simulated results and those measured directly using real GPR transducers.