High sensitive pulse inductive eddy current measurement for mine detection systems

Due to military conflicts, more than 100 million landmines are scattered all over the world. Besides the unbelievable human suffering these mines cause, mines are a strong economic and environmental problem and prevent industrial and agricultural use of land. State of the art mine detection is mainly based on metal detectors (MD). Due to military and urban metal parts like shrapnel, nails, etc., a huge number of "false alarms" make mine clearance a very time consuming and expensive task. Different MD technologies are compared, and the high sensitivity pulse inductive eddy current measurement method is presented. Measurement of low level magnetic fields immediately after high-energy magnetic pulses is presented, including the application of a high-resolution DAQ system with sample rates higher than 10/sup 6/. Test results and data analyses are presented for the time domain and the frequency domain.