A FDTD model for the post-reception synthetic focusing surface penetrating radar with mine detecting applications

Surface penetrating radar (SPR) is extensively used in military, civil, geophysical and archaeological applications. There has been an increasing emphasis on the use of SPR in the identification of buried unexploded ordnance, such as anti-tank mines, antipersonnel mines etc., which can be metallic or plastic in nature. Mine detection methods can be classified as destructive or non-destructive. Non-destructive mine detection methods employ metal detectors, magnetometers, infrared sensors and SPR. However, neither the metal detector nor the magnetometer can differentiate a mine from metallic debris and the infrared sensor merely notes a difference in thermal conductivity. In most battle fields the soil is contaminated by large quantity of shrapnel, metal scraps and cartridge cases which will give a high false alarm rate in the identification process. In this scenario the SPR is a promising technique for identification of both metallic and plastic mines. The use of finite difference time domain (FDTD) model to analyse the SPR, which makes use of post-reception synthetic focusing (PRSF) techniques, is presented.