Vivaldi Antenna for Ground Penetrating Radar Applications

The Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) is an advanced technique used for identifying and detecting objects beneath the surface. Ultra Wideband (UWB) antennas are utilized as a part of GPR system for transmission and reception of short electromagnetic pulses. The fundamental source of difficulty lies in the performance of GPR for detecting the subsurface objects is the reflection from the antenna itself. These reflections cause late time ringing; which makes problem in the recognition of the underground object. Reflections in the antenna itself can be examined by studying transient behavior of the antenna. This paper focuses on the theoretical investigation of the design of UWB Vivaldi antenna (1GHz - 2.6GHz) for GPR applications. Vivaldi antenna has been designed, optimized and simulated in the CST Microwave Studios. The optimized Vivaldi antenna has a lower return loss and VSWR at a center frequency (1.8 GHz) of -35dB and around 1.0, respectively. Vivaldi antenna is also modeled with the GPR environment (i.e. with earth and scatterer inside the earth). Hence, the optimized Vivaldi antenna is presented to use for GPR applications.