Section: Other Grants and Activities

Ultra-wideband microwave imaging and inversion (MAXWELL)

Participants : Victorita Dolean, Mohamed El Bouajaji, Stéphane Lanteri, Christian Pichot [ LEAT, Sophia Antipolis ] .

The project-team is a partner of the MAXWELL project (Novel, ultra-wideband, bistatic, multipolarization, wide offset, microwave data acquisition, microwave imaging, and inversion for permittivity) which is funded by ANR under the non-thematic program (this project has started in January 2008 for a duration of 4 years). This project is coordinated by Christian Pichot from the LEAT (Laboratoire d'Electronique Antennes et Télécommunications) in Sophia Antipolis and the other partners are: the Géosciences Azur Laboratory in Sophia Antipolis and the MIGP (Laboratoire de Modélisation et Imagerie en Géosciences de Pau) Laboratory. This project aims at the development of a complete microwave imaging system, with a frequency bandwidth of 1.87 GHz, ranging from 130 MHz to 2 GHz, using unstructured mesh solvers of the time harmonic Maxwell equations which drive a generalized least-squares inversion engine, whose output is a subsurface map of the relative permittivity. Subsidiary goals of the project are: (a) the construction and calibration of two ultra-wideband antennas, (b) the construction of two types of carriages for performing data acquisition, (c) the acquisition of dense microwave data with very wide offset for the entire bandwidth from 130 MHz to 2 GHz and for 2 orthogonal co-polarizations and one cross-polarization, (d) the reprocessing of data, including gain and kinematic inversion using conventional seismic processing formulations and (e) the development of discontinuous Galerkin solvers on simplicial meshes for the numerical solution of the time harmonic Maxwell equations and their integration into an inversion system.