The Doppler Effect

The Doppler effect: From highly ridiculed to absolutely indispensable

APRIL 18, 2022 BY BILL SCHWEBER
Originally derided as scientifically erroneous, the Doppler effect is now a vital tool
in all aspects of technology, ranging from microscopic to galactic.

Engineers are familiar with many “effects” ranging from widely used ones such as
the piezoelectric effect to somewhat lesser-known ones such as the RF skin effect
and even less-familiar ones such as the Coanda effect, to cite just a few.

But there’s one effect that is both widely known and used by engineers in systems
across many disciplines: the Doppler Effect, named after physicist Christian
Doppler, who described the phenomenon in a theoretical paper in 1842. In fact,
the term is at least known by many non-technical public, even if they don’t actually
know exactly what it means or how it functions.

In brief, the Doppler effect is the change in frequency of a periodic wave with
respect to an observer who is moving relative to the wave source (one or both may
be moving). Employing the Doppler effect and its associated Doppler shift makes
it possible to determine a sensed object’s relative motion (both speed and
acceleration) as perceived by the observer. It is a versatile and vital phenomenon
of wave physics that has a long list of applications from very small scales to
extraordinarily large ones, including:

• Ultrasonic Doppler to sense blood flow in the circulatory system.

• Ultrasonic and RF radar Doppler to sense motion of people in an area.
• Optical Doppler to determine speed of autonomous cars.
• RF Doppler in radar to judge vehicles, ships, aircraft, and even spacecraft.
• Optical and RF Doppler to measure spacecraft speed and even astronomical
bodies such as stars and galaxies (often referred to as red shift for those
receding and blue shift for those approaching).

In recent years, technological advances have made the Doppler effect an enabling
enhancement for many sensing systems. For example, while early medical
ultrasound systems could show the presence and size of veins and arteries, the
addition of the Doppler aspect allows for non-invasive measurement of the speed
of blood flow, a major diagnostic improvement.
The Doppler principle

Although it can be defined with precise equations, the Doppler effect can also be
described conceptually. When the source of repetitive waves at constant frequency
moves towards the observer, each successive crest of the wave series begins at
a position slightly closer to the observer than the crest of the previous wave. Thus,
each successive wave takes slightly less time to reach the observer than the
previous one; this, in turn, shrinks the time between the arrivals of successive wave
crests at the observer, corresponding to an increase in the observed frequency

The Doppler effect in EM and cellular phones

MARCH 18, 2016 BY DAVID HERRES

Prior to 1800 the Doppler Effect was unknown because there weren’t speeding
railroad trains or motorized fire trucks with blaring sirens, so the phenomenon was
outside of human experience.The first person to take note of the Doppler Effect
and after whom it was named was an Austrian, Christian Doppler. He had poor
health and died young but nevertheless wrote over 50 articles on mathematics and
astronomy. In 1842 he published a book titled On the Colored Light of the Binary
Stars and Some Other Stars of the Heavens. There he stated that the observed
frequency of a wave depends on the relative speed of the source and the observer.
This principle applies equally to the pitch of sound propagated through air and to
the observed color of visible light, or for that matter to any other type of energy that
is propagated as waves.

If the source and observer are moving apart, the frequency will be lower than if
they are stationary. For visible light, this is known as red shift. If source and
observer are moving toward one another, the frequency will be higher. This is
known as blue shift, which is less frequent since the universe is expanding. If, from
the perspective of another observer, the first observer is moving away from the
source and the source is moving toward the first observer at a faster speed
(catching up) the frequency will be blue shifted since it is strictly the relative speed
that counts.

If the relative speed is changing, the frequency will change like a musician’s
glissando.The Doppler Effect is equally applicable for waves that propagate
through a medium such as sound or water, or for waves that do not require a
medium for propagation such as light (or other electromagnetic energy) moving
through a vacuum.The Doppler Effect has been used in astronomy to ascertain the
speed that stars and galaxies are approaching or receding from us. The
phenomenon is used to detect binaries, to measure the speed of rotation of
galaxies and to find exoplanets.

Bright and dark lines in spectra of stars serve as benchmarks. If they are uniformly
displaced in a given spectrum, that indicates that the source is either approaching
or receding from an observer on earth.Edwin Hubble, who had previously shown
from observation of Cepheid variables that many galaxies lay far outside our Milky
Way, in 1929 made a study of red shifts. He found that greater red shifting
correlated with greater distance of celestial objects. This implied that the universe
is expanding rapidly. Subsequent researchers came to the astonishing conclusion,
now generally accepted, that all matter was originally concentrated in a single
infinitesimally small point that exploded 13.82 billion years ago in an event termed
the Big Bang.

Doppler effects play a role in telecommunications and computations of signal path

loss and fading. Fading refers to the attenuation of a signal unpredictably at the
receiver, causing transmission problems. The Doppler shift effect can contribute
to fading due to multipath propagation.In multipath propagation, the signal reaches
the receiver via multiple paths. When there are multiple signals at the same
frequency, there is a potential for destructive interference because of phase-shifted
signals arriving from different directions. The situation gets interesting when
multipath signals bounce off objects that are moving. In that case, there’s a
potential for a Doppler shift between two signals. The relative speed of a moving
source differs for different objects sitting at multiple locations. The difference
between the Doppler shifts in signals coming from the same transmitter and using
two different paths is called the Doppler spread. In a way similar to how phase-
shifted signals cancel each other by destructive interference, frequency-shifted
signals interfere and create fading.

Researchers are putting a lot of work into avoiding Doppler spread-induced fading,
particularly in regard to the new frequency bands that will be used for the 5G
cellular networks scheduled to roll out in the near future. The aim is to predict how
Doppler effects will impact signal propagation and correct for them accordingly.
One approach being evaluated employs machine-learning algorithms. The main
idea is to estimate the Doppler spread using inputs such as emitter velocity and
target distance to come up with a means of correcting the waveform accordingly.

This would be different than in 4G and earlier cellular networks. There, path loss
calculations allowed for Doppler effects generally used statistical probability
models for the likelihood of transmitters and receivers moving toward or away from
each other. These models were basically empirical, developed by making field
measurements rather than through mathematical derivations.