STEP-FREQUENCY RADAR APPLIED ON THIN ROAD LAYERS

Abstract

In the field of road construction and maintenance, the need for information on the thickness of very thin road layers is not satisfied by means of commercial pulse GPR, due to the inability of such devices to operate over ranges of several gigahertz. As a result, research has focused on the design of a step-frequency radar technique, able to work with very high-frequency synthetic pulses.An ultrawide band antenna, belonging to the family of Vivaldi antennas, has been developed for road applications. It has been created using stripline technology and yields a band width greater than one decade. During an initial step, this antenna was tested on various bituminous concrete samples with a network analyzer. Different parameters were studied, including band width, offset between antennas, and height and shape of the frequency-dependent pulse.A second step involved GPR dynamic measurements. A customized software program enabled recording data from the network analyzer. Several radar profiles were developed from selected road construction and maintenance test sites (e.g. the Circular Pavement Fatigue Test Track, composed of a number of known structures). Results show improved resolution when compared to a commercial impulse GPR system.