An Investigation of Some Geometrical Shapes and Selection of Shielding and Lumped Resistors of Planar Dipole Antennas for GPR Applications Using FDTD

A ground-penetrating radar (GPR) antenna system is modeled using the three-dimensional finite-difference time-domain technique. This paper investigates some basic geometrical shapes for planar dipoles to find what shape gives the best performance for GPR applications. The antenna is resistor loaded and shielded by a rectangular conducting cavity to suit the application. The effect of adding a wave-absorbing coat to the shield is also studied. Furthermore, a genetic algorithm is used to optimize the cavity height and the resistor values