Davide D’Aria and Paolo Falcone and Luigi Maggi and Aldo Cero and Giovanni Amoroso
MIMO RadarBased System for Structural Health Monitoring and Geophysical Applications
258 - 265
2019
13
5
International Journal of Structural and Construction Engineering
https://publications.waset.org/pdf/10010362
https://publications.waset.org/vol/149
World Academy of Science, Engineering and Technology
The paper presents a methodology for realtime structural health monitoring and geophysical applications. The key elements of the system are a high performance MIMO RADAR sensor, an optical camera and a dedicated set of software algorithms encompassing interferometry, tomography and photogrammetry. The MIMO Radar sensor proposed in this work, provides an extremely high sensitivity to displacements making the system able to react to tiny deformations (up to tens of microns) with a time scale which spans from milliseconds to hours. The MIMO feature of the system makes the system capable of providing a set of twodimensional images of the observed scene, each mapped on the azimuthrange directions with noticeably resolution in both the dimensions and with an outstanding repetition rate. The backscattered energy, which is distributed in the 3D space, is projected on a 2D plane, where each pixel has as coordinates the LineOfSight distance and the crossrange azimuthal angle. At the same time, the high performing processing unit allows to sense the observed scene with remarkable refresh periods (up to milliseconds), thus opening the way for combined static and dynamic structural health monitoring. Thanks to the smart TXRX antenna array layout, the MIMO data can be processed through a tomographic approach to reconstruct the threedimensional map of the observed scene. This 3D point cloud is then accurately mapped on a 2D digital optical image through photogrammetric techniques, allowing for easy and straightforward interpretations of the measurements. Once the threedimensional image is reconstructed, a &39;repeatpass&39; interferometric approach is exploited to provide the user of the system with high frequency threedimensional motionvibration estimation of each point of the reconstructed image. At this stage, the methodology leverages consolidated atmospheric correction algorithms to provide reliable displacement and vibration measurements.
Open Science Index 149, 2019