Effects of antenna-target polarization and target-medium dielectric contrast on GPR signal from non-metal pipes using FDTD simulation

Ground penetrating radar (GPR) is widely used especially in subsurface pipes investigation and detection. The general practice is that the parallel antenna-target polarization is used for metal pipe GPR imaging and normal antenna-target polarization for non-metal pipe imaging. However, such practice does not always produce optimized results. The main reason is that the dielectric contrast in a non-metal pipes GPR imaging play an important roles in generating a good GPR signal. The research intends to highlight these issues by incorporating a finite-difference time domain (FDTD) simulation for several cases. The important observation is that antenna-target polarization as well as the dielectric contrast are two important criteria in determining a good GPR signal for non-metal pipes imaging.