IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ANTENNAS AND PROPAGATION, VOL. 51, NO.

3, MARCH 2003

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A New Ultrawide-Bandwidth Dielectric-Rod Antenna for Ground-Penetrating Radar Applications

Chi-Chih Chen, Member, IEEE, Kishore Rama Rao, and Robert Lee, Senior Member, IEEE
AbstractA new ultrawidebandwidth dielectric-rod antenna is presented with its application in detecting shallow targets, such as antipersonnel (AP) mines. The lowest hybrid mode is launched and guided along a circular-dielectric waveguide. The end of the waveguide is tapered to a point where electromagnetic waves are radiated out with field behavior similar to that radiated from a Hertzian dipole in the forward direction. The low antenna clutter and weak antenna-ground interaction are two unique features. Its near-field radiation properties are investigated by directly probing the fields and by numerical simulation with a three-dimensional finite-difference time-domain technique. Both measurement and numerical simulation results are presented for the detection of buried AP mines using a prototype dielectric-rod antenna operated at a frequency range from 1 to 6 GHz. Index TermsAntenna, broad bandwidth, ground-penetration radar (GPR), landmine, modeling.

I. INTRODUCTION HE ground-penetrating radars (GPRs) have been used as nonintrusive instruments for subsurface investigation. For deep applications, a GPR is usually operated in the kilohertz and megahertz frequency ranges to achieve greater penetration. For shallow applications, such as the detection of buried landmines, the 16-GHz frequency range gives a reasonable tradeoff between penetration and resolution. For all GPR systems, the antenna design plays a vital role in the performance of the system. Broad bandwidth, good efficiency, and low antenna clutter are usually three important requirements of a good GPR antenna. Most deep-application GPRs place their antennas close to the ground surface for better energy coupling and less surface scattering. A major drawback of this configuration is the strong antenna-ground interaction which can significantly change the antennas characteristics. This has been shown in the literature, [1][3]. Such interaction produces noticeable antenna clutter. In a well-controlled environment, the effects of the interaction can be removed through the use of a known buried calibration target, however, in reality, it is not feasible to dig a hole for the placement of a calibration target within the mine field. In addition, the performance of the GPR system depends heavily on the surface and soil conditions that often vary from time to time and from place to place. It is usually desirable to elevate the GPR antenna off the ground for shallow applications because both antennatarget

and antennaground interactions are reduced. However, there are two major problems. First, the ground surface reflection reduces both radar efficiency and sensitivity. Second, the surface roughness creates undesirable clutter that arrives at the radar over a wide time range due to scattering contributions from a large portion of the ground. This situation gets worse as the antenna height increases. One way to reduce the reflection from the ground surface is to radiate the ground at an oblique angle. Unfortunately, this remedy for the surface reflection increases the illumination area and causes higher surface clutter levels and wider time spreading making it even more difficult to detect a buried object. A focused-beam illumination was introduced by Chen et al. [4] to achieve a greater antenna-to-ground distance while keeping the illumination spot on the ground minimized. Although the antenna illumination was normally incident on the ground producing a strong surface reflection, it was shown that such a reflection can be easily separated from the scattered waves of a shallow target in the time domain. The major disadvantages of such an antenna are the bulky reflector and the minimum achievable spot size which is limited to approximately a wavelength at the lowest frequency of interest. In this paper, a new ultrawideband (UWB) dielectric-rod antenna design is introduced for the detection of shallow objects. This new design provides localized illumination, weak antenna-ground interaction, convenient in-situ calibration, and compact size. A prototype dielectric-rod antenna was constructed to operate in the 26-GHz frequency range. The rod has a relative dielectric constant of approximately 3, length of 60 cm and width of 7.6 cm. A numerical model of this prototype was also constructed with the finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) method. The FDTD method has been successfully used in the past to model numerous problems involving antennas radiated energy into the ground [5][7]. In this paper, the propagation and radiation properties of the dielectric-rod antenna were investigated from both direct field probed data as well as numerical simulation data. The results verified that broad bandwidth electromagnetic energy was effectively radiating out of the tip with spherical wavefronts. This prototype antenna has been used for the detection of buried mines located at Fort A.P. Hill in Virginia, and measurements from this effort will be presented. II. UWB DIELECTRIC-ROD ANTENNA

Manuscript received January 5, 2000; revised April 27, 2000. This work was supported in part by Fort Belvoir, VA, and by Duke University, Durham, NC, under an Award from the Army Research Office (ARO). The authors are with ElectroScience Laboratory, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH 43212 USA. Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TAP.2002.802081

The use of a dielectric cylinder as a waveguide has been investigated by numerous researchers [8][10]. In particular, the propagation attenuation properties of the transverse electric (TE) and transverse magnetic (TM) modes in a dielectric circular rod was studied by Elsasser [10]. These modes have cutoff

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Fig. 1. The dielectric-rod with dipole mode.

frequencies that limit them to narrow-bandwidth applications. On the other hand, hybrid modes do not have cutoff frequencies and, thus, are more suitable for broader bandwidth applications. The mode of interest for our application is the HE mode, which is also sometimes called the dipole mode since its field distribution is similar to that of an electrical dipole. Fig. 1 illustrates the field behavior of the dipole mode given by Walter [11]. The HE mode is guided along the dielectric-rod with both internal and external fields to satisfy the air-dielectric boundary conditions. The energy ratio of the internal and external fields have been investigated and can be found in [12]. When the rod diameter is much greater than an internal wavelength, most of the energy is guided within the rod with a phase velocity close to that of a plane wave in an infinite dielectric material. When the rod diameter is only a fraction of the internal wavelength, most of the energy is guided external to the rod with a phase velocity close to that of a plane wave in free space. Such behavior suggests some degree of dispersion caused by the phase velocity variation as a function of frequency. Therefore, a proper calibration is required to reduce the dispersion effect. When such a waveguide is terminated properly, the electromagnetic energy then radiates out and thus, gives rise to a dielectric-rod antenna. Earlier work on dielectric-rod antennas have been reported by Mueller et al. [12] and Watson et al. [13] and were referred to as polyrod antennas since the rod was made of polystyrene. Mueller also studied the near- and far-field patterns for several different shapes of polyrod antennas [14], [15]. Almost all previous rod antenna designs were narrow bandwidth devices due to the narrow band performance of the feed structure for the rod antenna. In addition, those rod antennas were used for far-field applications. The UWB feature of the new dielectric-rod antenna is achieved by utilizing a broad bandwidth feed which only excites the hybrid HE mode of a dielectric circular waveguide. The new ultrawide-bandwidth dielectric-rod antenna is mainly used for near-field measurements. As will be shown, the fields radiated from the new rod antenna resembles those from a Hertzian dipole. Therefore, the illumination spot size on the ground can be controlled by the antenna height. Another important feature of the new antenna is that it can be accurately calibrated. Measurement results for buried antipersonnel (AP) mines showed its superior performance compared to all our previous antennas. Some of these results will be discussed in this paper. Two key design issues of the new UWB rod antenna include: 1) choosing a proper low-loss dielectric material and rod

Fig. 2. FDTD model for the new circular dielectric-rod antenna above ground where a mine-like disk is buried.

diameter to be greater than one waveguide wavelength such that most energy is guided within the rod and 2) terminating the rod properly to reduce end reflections as well as interactions with the ground interface under measurement. The end could be terminated by tapering the diameter down, as adopted in this paper, or by tapering the dielectric constant or the combination of both [18]. The total termination length should be minimized to avoid excessive movement of the radiation center.

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(a)

(b)

(c) Fig. 3. E plane field distributions. (a) Field guided in the antenna. (b) Spherical wavefront radiated by the antenna. (c) Scattered field from a buried mine-like dielectric target. The relative permittivity and conductivity of the soil are 3 and 0.01 S/m.

III. FDTD NUMERICAL MODELING A numerical model was created for the prototype rod antenna to gain a better understanding of its propagation and radiation properties. The three-dimensional (3-D) FDTD method [17] is used because of its ability to handle inhomogeneous media and provide accurate results valid over a wide range of frequencies at a modest computational cost. Fig. 2 shows the side view and cross-sectional view of the FDTD model near the radiating tip of the circular rod antenna positioned over a circular dielectric disk buried in soil. The 3-D computational domain is discretized in. A stairstep apinto cubic cells where the cell dimension is

proximation is used to model the circular contour of the dielectric rod as well as the narrowing of the diameter of the dielectric rod down to its tip. Unlike a perfectly conducting stairstep, a dielectric stairstep produces significantly smaller errors. In addition, the relative dielectric for cells along the stairstep path is set to the average of the relative dielectric of the rod and the free space region. This blurring of the dielectric properties tends to further reduce the errors produced by the stairstepping. The time increment for the simulation is chosen to satisfy the stability criterion [18]. The anisotropic perfectly matched layer (PML) [19] is used to prevent reflections from the truncated boundary. The conductivity of the PML is chosen to have a quadratic variation

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along the direction in which attenuation is desired. The PML layers are eight-cells thick on all sides. The antenna is excited by an directed transient current pulse in the form of a differentiated Gaussian given by (1) , , and s. where This pulse was chosen because the frequency content of pulse is most significant over the desired operational frequency range of 16 GHz. Fig. 3(a) and (b) show the snapshots of the calculated field , when distribution of the copolarization component, i.e., the wave was propagating down the rod and was radiating into free-space, respectively. The gray scale indicates the field magnitude. It can be seen from Fig. 3(a) that most of the energy is confined in the dielectric rod as desired. Furthermore, the field distribution also indicates a pure mode has been excited. The energy then radiates out near the tip with a spherical wavefront which is also compared with a dashed circular arc as shown in Fig. 3(b). It is also noticed from Fig. 3(b) that very little reflection occurs at the tip. This is achieved by a properly shaped tapering. Note that the radiation occurs when the rod diameter becomes less than the internal wavelength. A longer taper may further reduce the end reflection but would cause the radiation center to spread over a larger distance in the desired frequency range. In GPR applications, it is often desirable to have a small illumination spot on the ground to minimize surface clutter and also achieve a good spatial resolution. The new UWB dielectric-rod antenna can achieve this goal when operating near the ground. and cross-polarization The radiated copolarization fields at 4 GHz on the ground surface shown in Fig. 2(a) are also calculated and shown in Fig. 4(a) and (b). Different contours indicate different field intensity levels that have been normalized against the copolarization field intensity at center of ground and axes are domsurface. The radiated fields along the inated by copolarization components as indicated by the negligible cross-polarization fields. The spherical nature of the radiated wavefront gives rise to the cross-polarization component in the off-axis regions. Therefore, the radiation properties of the new UWB dielectric-rod antenna in the forward direction is very similar to a Hertzian dipole. To demonstrate the wide bandwidth property of the radiation pattern, the radiated field distribution along the axis is plotted for different frequencies as shown in Fig. 5. The actual field distribution for the prototype rod antenna was also measured and shown in Fig. 6 for comparison. As one can see, the measured data and the calculated data are in very good agreement. It can be seen that the width of the illumination spot remains approximately constant above 2.4 GHz, whose guided wavelength is approximately equal to the diameter of the rod. The detection of a shallowly buried nonmetallic AP mine has been a challenging problem due to the combination of dominant ground surface scattering, weak target backscattering, and the close minesurface distance. This difficulty worsens as the minesoil dielectric contrast decreases or as the size of the mine gets smaller. The UWB dielectric-rod antenna has been chosen for landmine detection over other antennas due to its desirable

(a)

(b) Fig. 4. The radiated field distributions on a plane normal to the axis of the antenna. (a) Copolarization, E . (b) Crosspolarization, E .

small illumination area and weak antennaground interaction features. The latter allows one to perform a good antenna calibration. A FDTD model is developed to evaluate the performance of the UWB dielectric-rod antenna in detecting a buried nonmetallic AP mine that is simulated by a circular dielectric disk. The diameter and height of the disk are and in, respectively. The relative dielectric constant of the disk is chosen to be 3. A realistic relative dielectric constant of 9 and conductivity of 0.01 S/m were chosen for the soil. The tip of the antenna is elevated above the ground surface. Fig. 3(c) plots the calculated

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Fig. 5. Calculated field distribution along the Y axis as a function of frequency.

scattered field 0.431 ns after the dominant wavefront enters the ground. The scattered field is defined to be the difference between the field in the presence of the disk and the field in the absence of the disk. From the figure, it can be observed that the majority of energy is transmitted through the disk. The much weaker backscattered fields then enter the UWB dielectric-rod antenna, which indicates that an AP mine buried in a low-permittivity soil will be more difficult to detect. Significant multiple reflections occur between the airground and groundmine interfaces. The weak antennaground interaction is verified by the fact that no observable multiple reflections occur between the antenna tip and the ground surface.

size was measured to verify the calibration. Fig. 7 compares the radar cross section of the calibrated data and its theoretical values obtained from the moment method. The agreement is very good. As one can see, such calibration procedure can be easily performed in the field. V. MEASUREMENT EXAMPLES FOR BURIED AP MINES The said prototype antenna was used to measure buried landmines at a government test site located at the Fort A.P. Hill, VA. The antenna tip was elevated two to three inches off the ground. Frequency-swept data were collected with a network analyzer at intervals of 0.54 cm as the antenna was moved along a straight line by a linear scanner. The data were then converted into the time domain via the Fourier transform. After each scan, the time versus position data were displayed to the operator as demonstrated in Fig. 8 where an AP mines, PMA-3, was buried at approximately 5-cm depth near 0.3 meter position. The PMA-3 mine has a flat cylindrical body whose height and diameter are 36 and 103 mm, respectively. This type of mine contains almost no metal content and is very difficult to detect with a mine detector. The gray scale is proportional to the measured voltage. The strong surface reflections are clearly seen at earlier time region (top of Fig. 8). This surface reflection can easily be significantly reduced if desired, using processing techniques [20]. It is shown here to demonstrate the unprocessed data. One way to look at more scattering details is to take the derivative of the data in the spatial direction. This is also included in Fig. 9. Such a space-time scattering pattern is related to external and internal

IV. UWB ROD ANTENNA CALIBRATION METHOD As mentioned earlier, calibration is necessary to reduce the dispersion effect for the weakly guided low-frequency components. First, a reference target was measured by placing a short conducting rod approximately 5 cm in front of the antenna tip with its axis parallel to the electric field. Second, any internal reflections caused by the internal mismatches at the cable connections, antenna feed, and antenna tip were also measured by simply aiming the rod into an empty space. The background response was then subtracted out of the data. A conventional radar calibration procedure was applied with the reference data and the exact solution calculated from a numerical technique such as the moment method. Another conducting rod with a different

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Fig. 6. Measured field distribution along the Y axis as a function of frequency.

Fig. 7. Comparison of theoretical and measured (calibrated) data for a short conducting cylinder.

Fig. 8. Calibrated data of a low metallic AP mine, PMA-3 buried at 5-cm depth at the Fort A.P. Hill JUXOCO site using the new dielectric-rod antenna.

scattering characteristics such as the symmetry, shape, composition, edges, cavities, and thickness. It is also a function of the mine orientation. Special two-dimensional (2-D) image recognition techniques can be developed to extract various scattering features and perform mine classification. In the case shown here,

the type and location of the mine were known. It should be noted that such classification approach is made possible by the fine spatial and temporal resolution that are achieved by the good calibration, broad bandwidth, and small illumination spot-size characteristics of the new dielectric-rod antenna design.

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Fig. 9. Spatial derivative data of a low metallic AP mine, PMA-3 buried at 5-cm depth.

VI. SUMMARY A new UWB dielectric-rod antenna design suitable for the detection of shallow buried targets is presented. A prototype antenna was built and tested. Good measurement results were obtained from government test sites. The wave propagation and radiation properties of this prototype were further verified by a numerical model based on the FDTD technique. Both measured data and calculated data indicate that the broad bandwidth electromagnetic fields are first guided along the rod and then radiated out near the end of the rod. The radiated wave properties are similar to those from a Hertzian dipole in the forward direction. It was shown that an accurate calibration can be done easily in the field. By controlling the antenna height to the ground surface, one can also control the illumination spot size and thus, control the surface clutter. To effectively guide the electromagnetic energy inside the rod, its diameter should be greater than one internal wavelength. The upper frequency bound is limited by the excitation of other modes. REFERENCES
[1] R. F. Procter, Input impedance of a horizontal dipole aerial at low height above ground, Proc. Inst. Elect. Eng., pp. 188190, 1950. [2] A. S. Abul-Kassem, Experimental study of the characteristics of a horizontal antenna above a dissipative homogeneous earth, M.S. thesis, Dept. Elect. Eng., Univ. Colorado , Denver, CO, 1972. [3] P. Hayes, Electromagnetic behavior of transmission lines and resonant wires very near a lossy dielectric interface, Ph.D. dissertation, ElectroScience Lab., The Ohio State Univ., Columbus, OH, 1983. [4] C.-C. Chen, S. Nag, W. D. Burnside, J. Halman, K. Shubert, and L. Peters, Jr., A stand-off focused-beam land mine radar, IEEE Trans. Geosci. Remote Sensing, vol. 38, pp. 507514, Jan. 2000. [5] J. M. Bourgeois and G. S. Smith, A complete electromagnetic simulation of the separated-aperture sensor for detecting buried land mines, IEEE Trans. Antennas Propagat., vol. 46, pp. 14191426, Oct. 1998. [6] Y. Nishioka, O. Maeshima, T. Uno, and S. Adachi, FDTD analysis of resistor-loaded bow-tie antennas covered with ferrite-coated conductivity cavity for subsurface radar, IEEE Trans. Antennas Propagat., vol. 47, pp. 970977, June 1999. [7] T. P. Montoya and G. S. Smith, Land mine detection using a ground penetrating radar ased on resistively loaded vee dipoles, IEEE Trans. Antennas Propagat., vol. 47, pp. 17951806, Dec. 1999. [8] J. R. Carson, S. P. Mead, and S.A. Schelkunoff, Hyper-frequency wave guidesMathematical theory, Bell Syst. Tech. J., vol. XV, pp. 311333, 1936.

[9] C. H. Chandler, An investigation of dielectric rod as wave guide, J. Appl. Phys., vol. 20, pp. 11881192, 1949. [10] W. M. Elsasser, Attenuation in a dielectric circular rod, J. Appl. Phys., vol. 20, pp. 11931196, 1949. [11] C. H. Walter, Traveling Wave Antennas. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1965, p. 214. [12] G. E. Mueller and W. A. Tyrrell, Polyrod antennas, Bell Syst. Tech. J., vol. XXVI, pp. 837851, 1947. [13] R. B. Watson and C. W. Horton, The radiation pattern of dielectric rodsExperiment and theory, J. Appl. Phys., vol. 19, pp. 661670, 1948. [14] J. J. Panakel and G. E. Mueller, An investigation of polystyrene rod antennas, Antenna Lab., The Ohio State Univ., Columbus, OH, Tech. Rep. 510-11, June 1954. [15] G. E. Mueller, Dielectric antennas, Antenna Lab., The Ohio State Univ., Columbus, OH, Tech. Rep. 434-5, Feb. 1952. [16] C.C. Chen, K. Rama Rao, and R. Lee, A tapered-permittivity Rod Antenna for Ground Penetrating Radar Applications, J. Appl. Geophys., vol. 47/3-4, pp. 309316, Sept. 2001. [17] K. S. Yee, Numerical solution of initial boundary value problems involving Maxwells equations in isotropic media, IEEE Trans. Antennas Propagat., vol. AP-14, pp. 302307, 1966. [18] A. Taflove and M. E. Brodwin, Numerical solution of steady-state electromagnetic scattering problems using the time-dependent Maxwells equations, IEEE Trans. Microwave Theory Tech, vol. 23, pp. 623630, Aug. 1975. [19] L. Zhao and A. C. Cangellaris, GT-PML: Generalized theory of perfectly matched layers and its application to the reflectionless truncation of finite-difference time-domain grids, IEEE Trans. Microwave Theory Tech, vol. 44, pp. 25552563, Dec. 1996. [20] J. L. Salvati, C.-C. Chen, and J. T. Johnson, Theoretical study of a surface clutter reduction algorithm, in Proc. IGARSS, July 1998.

Chi-Chih Chen (S92M97) was born in Taiwan, R.O.C., in 1966. He received the B.S.E.E. degree from the National Taiwan University, Taiwan, R.O.C., and the M.S.E.E. and Ph.D. degrees from The Ohio State University, Columbus, in 1988, 1993, and 1997, respectively. In 1997, he joined the ElectroScience Laboratory, Ohio State University as a Postdoctoral Researcher and became a Senior Research Associate in 1999. His main research interests include the development of ground-penetrating radar, ultrawide-bandwidth antenna development, radar-signal processing, target detection, and classification. In recent years, his research activities have focused on the detection and classification of buried landmines, unexploded ordinance, and underground pipes. Dr. Chen is a Member of Sigma Xi and Phi Kappa Phi. He is currently serving as Chairman of the IEEE Joint APS/MTT Columbus Chapter.

Kishore Rama Rao received the B.E. degree in 1995, from Anna University, Chennai, India, and the M.S.E.E. degree, in 1998, from The Ohio State University, Columbus, where he is currently working toward the Ph.D. degree.

Robert Lee (M90SM01) received the B.S.E.E. degree from Lehigh University, Bethlehem, PA, and the M.S.E.E. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Arizona, Tucson, in 1983, 1988, and 1990, respectively. From 1983 to 1984, he was a Microwave Engineer with the Microwave Semiconductor Corporation, Somerset, NJ. From 1984 to 1986, he was a Member of the Technical Staff at Hughes Aircraft Company, Tucson, AZ. From 1986 to 1990, he was a Research Assistant at the University of Arizona. During summers from 1987 to 1989, he worked at Sandia National Laboratories, Albuquerque, NM. Since 1990, he has been at The Ohio State University, Columbus, where he is currently a Professor. His research interests include the analysis and application of finite methods to electromagnetics. Prof. Lee is a Member of the International Union of Radio Science (URSI). He was a recipient of the URSI Young Scientist Award in 1996.