Ground-Penetrating Radar (GPR) is a popular non-destructive geophysical technique with a wide range of diverse applications. Civil engineering, hydrogeophysics, forensic, glacier geology, human detection and borehole geology are some of the fields in which GPR has been applied with successful or promising results. One of the most mainstream applications of GPR is landmine detection. A lot of methods have been suggested over the years to assist the landmine detection issue. Metal detectors, trained rats or dogs, chemical methods and electrical resistivity tomography are –amongst others– some of the suggested techniques. The non-destructive nature of GPR makes it an attractive choice for a problem such as demining in which contact to the ground is not allowed. The main advantage of GPR is its ability to detect both metallic and non-metallic targets. Furthermore, GPR can provide an insight regarding the nature of the target (e.g. size, burial depth, type). From the above, it is evident that GPR can potentially reduce the false alarms emerging from small metallic objects (e.g. bullets, wires, etc.) usually encountered in battle-fields and industrialised areas. Combining the robustness of the metal detector with the resolution of GPR results in a reliable and efficient detection framework which has been successfully applied in Cambodia and Afghanistan. Despite the promising, and in some cases impressive results, aspects of GPR can be further improved in an effort to optimise GPR’s performance and decrease its limitations. The validation of a GPR system is usually achieved through the so called Receiver Operation Characteristics (ROC) which depicts the probability of detection with respect to the false alarm rate. ROC is a highly nonlinear function which is sensitive to the environment as well as to the antenna unit. Landmines are typically small objects, often less than 10 cm diameter, which are shallow buried, usually in less than 10 cm depth, and sometimes almost exposed. In order for the landmines to be resolved, high frequency antennas are essential. The latter are sensitive to soil’s inhomogeneities, rough surface, water puddles, vegetation and so on. Apart from that, the near field nature of the problem makes the antenna unit part of the medium which contributes to the unwanted clutter. The above, outlines the multi-parametric nature of the problem for which no straightforward approach has yet to be proposed. Numerical modelling is a practical and solid approach to understand the physical behaviour of a system. In the case of GPR for landmine detection, numerical modelling can be a practical tool for designing and optimising antennas in synthetic but nonetheless realistic conditions. Apart from that, evaluation of a processing method only to a specific environment is not a robust approach and does not provide any evidence for its wider inclusivity and limitations. However, evaluation in different conditions can become costly and unpractical. Numerical modelling can tackle this problem by providing data for a wide range of scenarios. An extensive database of simulated responses, apart from being a practical testbed, can be also employed as a training set for machine learning. A multi-variable problem like demining, in order to be addressed using machine learning, requires a large amount of data. These must equally include all possible different scenarios i.e. different landmines, in different media with stochastically varied properties and topography. Additionally, different heights of the antenna and different depths of the landmines must also be examined. Numerical modelling seems to be a practical approach to achieve an equally distributed and coherent dataset like the one briefly described above. Numerical modelling of GPR for landmine detection has been applied in the past using generic antennas in simplified and clinical scenarios. This approach can be used in an educational context just to provide a rough estimation of GPR’s performance. In the present thesis a realistic numerical scheme is suggested in which, simplifications are kept to a minimum. The numerical solver, employed in the suggested numerical scheme, is the Finite- Difference Time-Domain (FDTD) method. Both the dispersive properties and the Absorbing Boundary Condition (ABC) are implemented through novel and accurate techniques. In particular, a novel method which implements an inclusive susceptibility function is suggested and it is shown that surpasses the performance of the previous approaches while retaining their computational efficiency. Furthermore, Perfectly Matched Layer (PML) and more specifically Convolutional Perfectly Matched Layer (CPML) is implemented through a novel time-synchronised scheme which it is proven to be more accurate compared to the traditional CPML with no additional computational requirements. An accurate numerical solver, although essential, is not the only requirement for a realistic numerical framework. Accurate implementation of the geometry and the dielectric properties of the simulated model is highly important, especially when it comes to high-frequency near-field scenarios such as GPR for landmine detection. In the suggested numerical scheme, both the soil’s properties as well as the rough surface are simulated using fractal correlated noise. It is shown, that fractals can sufficiently represent Earth’s topography and give rise to semi-variograms often encountered in real soils. Regarding the dielectric properties of the soils, a semi-analytic function is employed which relates soil’s dielectric properties to its sand fraction, clay fraction, sand density, bulk density and water volumetric fraction. Subsequently, the semi-analytic function is approximated using a Debye function that can be easily implemented to FDTD. Vegetation is also implemented to the model using a novel method which simulates the geometry of vegetation through a stochastic process. The experimentally-derived dielectric properties of vegetation are approximated –similarly to soil’s dielectric properties– with a Debye expansion. The antenna units tested in the numerical scheme are two bow-tie antennas based on commercially available transducers. Regarding the targets, three landmines are chosen, namely, PMN, PMA-1 and TS-50. Dummy landmines are used in order to obtain their geometrical characteristics and comparison between measured and numerically evaluated traces are used to tune the dielectric properties of the modelled landmines. Lastly, water puddles are realistically implemented in the model in an effort to realistically simulate high-saturated scenarios. The proposed numerical scheme has been employed in order to test and evaluate widely used post-processing methods. The results clearly illustrate that post-processing methods are sensitive to the antenna unit as well as the medium. This highlights the importance of an accurate numerical scheme as a testbed for evaluating different GPR systems and post-processing approaches in wide range of scenarios. Using an equivalent 2D numerical scheme –restricted to 2D due to computational constrains– preliminary results are given regarding the effectiveness of Artificial Neural Network (ANN) subject to an adequate and equally distributed database. The results are promising, showing that ANN can be successfully employed for detection as well as classification using only a single trace as input. A basic requirement to do so is a representative training set. This can be synthetically generated using a realistic numerical framework. The above, provide solid arguments for further expanding the proposed machine learning scheme to the more computationally demanding 3D case.

Tese (doutorado)—Universidade de Brasília, Faculdade de Tecnologia, Departamento de Engenharia Elétrica, 2012. / Submitted by Alaíde Gonçalves dos Santos (alaide@unb.br) on 2013-01-25T12:20:01Z No. of bitstreams: 1 2012_LeandroCarisioFernandes.pdf: 11244387 bytes, checksum: 56968dbdb42928aca7dfd8945faf01cd (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by Guimaraes Jacqueline(jacqueline.guimaraes@bce.unb.br) on 2013-02-01T12:59:34Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 1 2012_LeandroCarisioFernandes.pdf: 11244387 bytes, checksum: 56968dbdb42928aca7dfd8945faf01cd (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2013-02-01T12:59:34Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 2012_LeandroCarisioFernandes.pdf: 11244387 bytes, checksum: 56968dbdb42928aca7dfd8945faf01cd (MD5) / A demanda por serviços de comunicações móveis cresce ano após ano. A implantação de sistema que ofereça esse tipo de serviço requer mecanismos de predição de cobertura de sinal, a fim de otimizar parâmetros usados na fase de planejamento. E importante considerar que, em um enlace de comunicação via rádio, a propagação do sinal não ocorre em situações ideais, na maioria das vezes. A quantidade de fenômenos que influenciam a propagação do sinal é proporcional a complexidade do ambiente. Em regra, em áreas urbanas existe um número maior de obstáculos do que em localidades rurais, o que torna mais complicado estimar a perda de propagação em cidades e metrópoles. Melhorar a estimativa da perda de propagação pode assegurar mais qualidade ao serviço oferecido por operadoras de telecomunicações. Este trabalho mostra como o ambiente urbano pode ser considerado no cálculo da perda de propagação em duas faixas de freqüência. Para a faixa de 900 MHz, são propostos métodos que analisam situações em que a altura da antena transmissora é menor do que a altura média das construções. Os resultados demonstram uma melhora signicativa quando comparados com aqueles obtidos por meio do modelo COST-Walfisch-Ikegami. Em ondas médias, na faixa de 1MHz, propõe-se uma correção da Recomendação ITU-R P.368 de forma a se incluir informações sobre a densidade de área ocupada por construções na localização do receptor. Os valores estimados do campo elétrico estão mais próximos dos dados de medidas do que os obtidos usando-se apenas a recomendação do ITU. O estudo da propagação em ambientes indoor também e um problema de grande interesse prático. Nesse caso, devido a complexidade do ambiente, o uso de equações analíticas torna-se impraticável. Uma forma de contornar essa restrição e usando métodos numéricos. Nesse sentido, será mostrado também como problemas de propagação em ambientes indoor podem ser analisados via métodos numéricos. _______________________________________________________________________________________ ABSTRACT / The demand for mobile communications services grows year after year. Path loss prediction models are necessary to deploy any system that o ers this service. In a wireless communication link, the propagation of the signal occurs mostly over a non line of sight path. The more complex the environment, the greater the number of phenomena that a ect the propagation of the signal. In urban areas, the number of obstacles is greater than in rural areas, and therefore it is more di cult to estimate the path loss in those sites. However, improve estimates of path loss in urban environment can also improve the quality of service o ered by telecommunications operators. Thus, this thesis shows how the urban environment can be considered to calculate the path loss in two frequency bands. Two path loss models are proposed at 900 MHz, when transmitting antenna is lower than the average height of the buildings. The results show a signi cant improvement when compared with COST-Wal sch-Ikegami model. For medium waves, at 1 MHz, a correction of Recommendation ITU-R P.368 is proposed to include information of area occupied by buildings in the receiver's location. The estimated values of the electric fi eld are better than those obtained using the Recommendation ITU-R P.368. Propagation in indoor environments is also a problem with practical interest. Due to the complexity of the environment, the use of analytical equation is impractical. Numerical methods solve this limitation. Thus, it will be shown how to analyse indoor environments using numerical methods.

The finite difference time domain (FDTD) method is commonly used for numerical simulations of the electromagnetic wave propagation in time domain. The FDTD method is easy to implement and the computational results are highly relevant to the analytical solution, so that the FDTD method is applied to variety application problems. However, the computational efficiency of the FDTD method is constrained by the upper limit of the temporal discretisation. The Courant Friedrich Lewy (CFL) stability condition limits the time step for the computation of the FDTD method, so that if the spatial discretisation of the computation is set to be small in order to obtain high accurate results, the size of the temporal discretisation need to be satisfy the CFL stability condition. The locally one dimensional FDTD (LOD-FDTD) method is unconditionally stable. The time step and the spatial step can be independently chosen for the computation of the LOD-FDTD method. The arithmetic operations of the LOD-FDTD method is fewer than that of the other implicit FDTD method, such as the Crank Nicolson FDTD (CN-FDTD) method and the alternating direction implicit FDTD (ADI-FDTD) method. Although the implementation of the LOD-FDTD method is simpler than that of the ADI-FDTD method,the numerical error in the computational results of the LOD-FDTD method is equivalent to that in the computational results of the ADI-FDTD method. In this thesis, a new three dimensional (3D) frequency dependent (FD) LOD-FDTD method is proposed. The one pole Debye model is incorporated into the 3D-FD-LOD-FDTD method in order to deal with practical applications. The proposed method is implemented in Fortran 90 and parallelised with OpenMP. A simulation model of the human phantom is developed in the 3D-FD-LOD-FDTD method with fine structures and frequency dependent dielectric properties of the human tissues, and numerical simulation of electromagnetic wave propagation inside the human head is shown.

This thesis has proposed a simplified model of corona discharge from an overhead wire struck by lightning for surge computations using the FDTD method. In the corona model, the progression of corona streamers from the wire is represented as the radial expansion of cylindrical conducting region around the wire. The validity of this corona model has been tested against experimental data. Then, its applications to lightning electromagnetic pulse computations have been reviewed. / 博士(工学) / Doctor of Philosophy in Engineering / 同志社大学 / Doshisha University

This thesis covers recent advances in the adjoint variable method for the sensitivity estimations through time-domain electromagnetic simulations. It considers both frequency-independent and frequency-dependent response functions, and at the same time, provides a novel adjoint treatment for addressing dispersive sensitivity parameters in the material constitutive relation. With this proposed adjoint technique, response sensitivities with respect to all N sensitivity parameters can be computed through at most one extra simulations regardless of the value of N. This thesis also extends the existing adjoint technique to estimate all N^2 second-order sensitivity entries in the response Hessian matrix through N additional simulations. All adjoint sensitivity techniques presented in this thesis are numerically validated through various practical examples. Comparison shows that our produced adjoint results agree with those produced through central finite-difference approximations or through exact analytical approaches. / Dissertation / Doctor of Engineering (DEng)

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