Finite-difference time-domain simulation of ground penetrating radar on dispersive, inhomogeneous, and conductive soils

A three-dimensional (3-D) time-domain numerical scheme for simulation of ground penetrating radar (GPR) on dispersive and inhomogeneous soils with conductive loss is described. The finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) method is used to discretize the partial differential equations for time stepping of the electromagnetic fields. The soil dispersion is modeled by multiterm Lorentz and/or Debye models and incorporated into the FDTD scheme by using the piecewise-linear recursive convolution (PLRC) technique. The dispersive soil parameters are obtained by fitting the model to reported experimental data. The perfectly matched layer (PML) is extended to match dispersive media and used as an absorbing boundary condition to simulate an open space. Examples are given to verify the numerical solution and demonstrate its applications. The 3-D PML-PLRC-FDTD formulation facilitates the parallelization of the code. A version of the code is written for a 32-processor system, and an almost linear speedup is observed.