Optimising models of commercial GPR antennas

This paper presents three-dimensional (3D) numerical models of commercially used Ground-Penetrating Radar (GPR) antennas from Geophysical Survey Systems, Inc. (GSSI) and Mala Geoscience. GprMax, an electromagnetic simulator based on the Finite-Difference Time-Domain (FDTD) technique, is used along with ParaView (an open-source visualisation ap-plication) to create and visualise the models. An implementation of Taguchi’s method is used to optimise unknown parameters in the models. Comparisons of real and modelled antenna free- space responses (crosstalk) have shown excellent agreement. Accurate antenna models of real GPR antennas allow the direct comparison of modelled and real GPR signals, providing an investigative tool for future research in areas such as material property and geometry information from GPR wavelets, and optimisation of antenna designs.