Mapping the Physical and Dielectric Properties of Layered Soil Using Short-Time Matrix Pencil Method-Based Ground-Penetrating Radar

This paper presents the mapping of the physical and dielectric properties of layered soil by using ground-penetrating radar (GPR). Poles extracted from the GPR signals by using the short-time matrix pencil method, along with preprocessing, including filtering and antenna calibration, were employed in order to map the physical and dielectric properties of the layered soil. With the proposed system, the conjugate gradient method was also introduced to solve the time-domain inverse problem faced in the antenna calibration. Experimentations were conducted on four different days in Nakhon Ratchasima province in Thailand, which is a potential area for the occurrence of hardpan. These were done based on the hypothesis that the soil properties, such as water content and dielectric constant, should change when the experimentation day changes in spite of the experimentations in the same area. In the experimentations, soil samples were collected using a core method, and their physical and dielectric properties were measured by using a standard laboratory method and a commercial dielectric probe kit. The measured soil properties and extracted poles for each experiment and each soil layer are shown and analyzed. The results indicate that the real part of the dielectric constants, strongly related to water content, can be mapped using extracted natural frequency. In order to map the dielectric properties, i.e. the water content and dielectric constants of the layered soil, the experimental results were fitted to $2^{\mathrm {nd}}$ -order polynomial curve. The largest regression value of the fitted curve was 0.9994. The bulk density, which is a physical property of the soil, distinguishes the soil type here differentiated by different soil layers. According to the experimental results, the hardpan occurred at the second soil layer because its bulk density was higher than 1.8 g/cm³. The bulk density was mapped by extracted poles, including damping factors and natural frequencies.