Ground Penetrating Radar(GPR) is an effective Non-Destructive Testing(NDT) technique for highway pavement surveys, which is able to acquire continuous pavement data compared with traditional core drilling method. In this study, we proposed an accurate and efficient method to estimate the thickness of each pavement layer using an air-coupled GPR system. For this work, the main difficulties are estimating each pavement layer's time delay and dielectric constant. We first give the basic signal model for pavement evaluation, and then present an Intrinsic Mode Functions(IMFs) product detector to determine each pavement layer's time delay. This method is based on Empirical Mode Decomposition(EMD), which is an adaptive signal decomposition procedure and proved to be suitable for suppressing noises in GPR signal. The dielectric constant was determined by metal reflection measurement. The laboratory and highway experiments illustrate that the proposed thickness estimation method yields reasonable result, thus meets the requirements of practical highway pavement survey with massive GPR data.
A novel low-cost 4-element planar array antenna directly fed by a coaxial cable for Ultra-WideBand(UWB) application is presented. The proposed antenna consists of 2×2 bowtie elements and a simple 1:4 power divider feeding network. Compared to the basic bowtie element, the impedance bandwidth of the array antenna has a significant improvement that the low cut-off frequency is extended from 6 GHz of the bowtie element to 2 GHz. The measured results show that the proposed antenna has a large bandwidth of 2 GHz to 11 GHz for Voltage Standing Wave Ratio(VSWR)<2, and exhibits a bidirectional radiation pattern and a modest gain across the operating band and a peak gain of about 9 dBi at 11 GHz.
A kind of architecture of Time-to-Digital Converter(TDC) for Ultra-WideBand(UWB) application is presented. The proposed TDC is based on pulse shrinking, and implemented in a Field Programmable Gate Array(FPGA) device. The pulse shrinking is realized in a loop containing two Programmable Delay Lines(PDLs) or a two-channel PDL. One line(channel) delays the rising edge and the other line(channel) delays the falling edge of a circulating pulse. Delay resolution of PDL is converted into a digital output code under known conditions of pulse width. This delay resolution measurement mechanism is different from the conventional time interval measurement mechanism based on pulse shrinking of conversion of unknown pulse width into a digital output code. This mechanism automatically avoids the influence of unwanted pulse shrinking by any circuit element apart from the lines. The achieved relative errors for four PDLs are within 0.80%–1.60%.
A simple Ultra-WideBand(UWB)exponentially-tapered Transverse ElectroMagnetic(TEM)horn antenna is presented for the asphalt detection based on Ground Penetrating Radar(GPR).In order to reduce the reflections from the antenna aperture,some absorbing material is loaded on the outer surface of the conductor.Comparing with the traditional TEM horn antenna,the proposed antenna has a small size and a large impedance bandwidth.Simulated and measured results show that the proposed TEM horn antenna has a low Voltage Standing Wave Ratio(VSWR)below 2 over the whole band from 0.35 GHz to 12 GHz,good radiation characteristics,and small late-time ringing,which can perfectly meet the requirements of the GPR application.
