Permittivity of sub-soil materials retrieved through transmission line model and GPR data

In this paper, we propose a new retrieval technique to estimate the dielectric permittivity of the sub-soil materials of a stratified structure. The core of the retrieval procedure is a proper electromagnetic circuit model representing the realistic stratified media as a cascade of transmission line segments. Exploiting the analogies between the electrical parameters of the transmission line segments and the constitutive parameters of the materials of the multilayer structure, the propagation of the Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) signal is equivalently represented as a pair of voltage and current waves propagating in the transmission line network. The effectiveness of the proposed retrieval technique is confirmed by proper experimental results. In particular, the retrieved electromagnetic parameters of the sub-soil materials are found to be consistent with the ones obtained by a direct characterization of the same materials. These results suggest that the proposed method can be successfully applied to the material characterization able to monitor several macroscopic properties of sub-soil materials. © 2015, Electromagnetics Academy. All rights reserved.