The G-BAT concept: In-soil Acoustic Integrated Detection and Location of Buried Metallic and Non-metallic Targets

This proposal develops an experimental prototype employing beam shaped acoustic pulse in soil for the integrated detection and location of buried metallic and non-metallic targets. Detection of buried mines exploiting the electromagnetic spectrum has had limited success because of the intrinsic trade-off in system (pixel) resolution, search rate, signal and image processing, as well as lack of robustness of the detection phenomenology. Most active acoustic systems sonify large volumes of the ground requiring complex signal processing to detect target from clutter. The proposed G-BAT concept does not suffer from these limitations because of selective use of acoustic energy in the integrated detection and location of the buried targets. In Phase I, the longitudinal acoustic propagation model is developed as detection phenomenology for the buried metallic and non-metallic targets. A prototype unit is designed and built based on the simulation results of the propagation model. Experiments are performed investigating the range and sensitivity of the proposed detection concept. The envisioned Phase II effort will establish the robustness of the detection phenomenology and focus on development of a rugged man-portable unit as well as vehicle mounted G-BAT sensor system. The results of the proposed Phase I efforts are directly applicable to the following commercial applications: road inspection, utility and pipe detection, 3-D mapping of underground objects, hazardous waste detection, nondestructive testing, passive acoustic monitoring.