Final Report Summary - RICANA (Radar Imaging: Challenges And New Approaches)
The general milestone of the RICANA project is to achieve novel advances in the Radar Imaging field so that a disruptive technology can emerge.
The desired progress cannot be undertaken without solving previously known technological challenges. It becomes essential, in the first place, to determine the electromagnetic behaviour for the usual materials disposed between the sounder and the objectives targets, based on its spectral signature, in order to correctly design a reliable detection system. Once determined this behaviour, a research field is opened for the optimization of these systems and their different components and subsystems.
The further step is the design of transmitting and receiving antennas adapted to the characteristics of the elements to detect. Also there is place for the research of other aspects of the sounding, like the optimization of the transmitted signal, alternative receiver schemes, and the processing algorithm of the received signal.
This project is funded by the 2008 IOF Marie Curie Actions (EU FP7 People Program) and this grant extends from June 2009 to December 2011. The participants are the Radio Systems Research Group of the University of Vigo (Vigo, SPAIN) (UVIGO) and the EMAG Research Group of the New Mexico State University (Las Cruces, NM, USA) (NMSU). The scientist in charge is Dr Manuel Garcia Sanchez in UVIGO and Dr Muhammad Dawood in NMSU. The fellow researcher is Dr Ana Alejos.
Up to present, the outcomes surpassed the initial objectives and the more noticeable result has been the achievement of the experimental demonstration of an electromagnetic phenomenon related to the dispersive nature of media such as soil, water, vegetation, tissues, metal and so on. The dispersive propagation occurring in these media produces the arise out of a waveform known as Brillouin precursor which has slept down on scientific textbooks since its theoretical prediction in 1914 due to the mathematical and computational difficulties to board the study as well as the technical challenge to demonstrate their practical existence.