Characteristics of ultra-wideband pulse scattered from metal planar objects

Abstract

In this paper, a method to estimate the characteristics of ultra-wideband (UWB) pulse scattered from metal planar objects in far-field is proposed. When the object is in near-field, the transition of the scattered pulse shape is studied. In addition, we define a frequency averaged radar cross section (RCS) of the metal planar object in terms of the effective height of the transmitting and receiving antennas, and the energy of the excitation and received pulses. We find excellent agreement between the estimated and measured scattered pulses for metal planar objects of sizes 100×100 mm2, 160×160 mm2, and 200×200 mm2. For the same objects, the estimated frequency averaged RCS are close to narrowband conventional RCS. The agreement validates the proposed method, allowing us to compute the scattered pulse shape and energy based on the conventional RCS of the object.