Evaluation of Materials and Structures with a Multistatic Ultra-Wideband Impulse Radar: A Concept Validation

Abstract

This document describes the results of the study contributing to the methods and tools applicable in plastic waste sorting systems that exploit the multistatic ultra-wideband impulse radar enforced with a deep learning signal processing back-end. The novelty of the research is the use of synthetic data for the development of a trained neural network before real data are available, and the use of a multistatic radar for the improvement of the training data set. The study results are described in multiple publications; the current paper shows the applicability of the described approach. The main results are as follows: a monostatic impulse radar can be used for the determination of material properties, such as thickness, dielectric permittivity, and losses, with limited accuracy; multistatic radar configuration increases the accuracy of the material property estimation; an open source finite difference time domain simulator can be used to simulate electromagnetic wave propagation in dielectric structures in order to generate synthetic data for development of optimized artificial neuron network structures used for the estimation of dielectric material properties, and the developed network can successfully be used for multistatic radar data processing.