Konferenzbeiträge

Due to increasingly complex and automated manufacturing processes of producing companies, the demands on the control parameters of these processes are also increasing. An important parameter is the fill quantity, whose precise determination is becoming of growing importance. It is of additional interest to be able to automatically determine what filling material is currently being used to ensure that the correct material is in the container. This paper shows with which accuracy an M-sequence UWB guided wave radar can determine levels in metallic and non-metallic containers and which possibilities exist to determine the filling material. First, the principle of level measurement using guided wave radar is explained and the measurement setup is described. Afterward, the measurement results are shown and discussed. The measurements show that the level can be measured with an accuracy of less than 0.5 mm. In addition, level fluctuations can be detected with an accuracy of 3 µm.

State-of-the-art antenna arrays require a significant installation area when envisaged for compact passenger cars, whose footprint area can be reduced by splitting the full array into two smaller, spatially distributed sub-arrays. The challenge of grating lobes develops while arranging the sub-arrays several wavelengths apart mounted on distant parts of a car. As a consequence, spatial sampling of the incident waves leads to ambiguous direction-of-arrival estimation. An inhomogeneous L-shaped orthogonal arrangement can, however, mitigate such drawbacks to some extent while allowing easier installation. The performance of such an array needs to be tested in a virtual electromagnetic environment in the course of the development process, even long before homologation. An example of such distributed array mounted on a conventional passenger car for satellite navigation is shown in this paper, and the array performance is tested in terms of positioning accuracy in presence of a jammer in our automotive antenna test facility.

In this paper we present the latest results of a research program on the use of ground penetrating radar and machine learning-based algorithms for humanitarian demining in Colombia. We describe the experimental setup developed, which includes a polarimetric GPR-UWB unit, a radar positioning system, and a control unit. We describe as well a soil characterization campaign and an IED classification technique based on Support Vector Machine.

Even though vehicular communication systems have been rolled out in road, they remain a prominent field of research and development. The functional and operational safety of vehicle-to-X system demands reliable and efficient methods for verification and validation, based on their functional principles and underlying wave-physical phenomena. To test such systems in virtual environment, we have undertaken empirical studies of the communication channel, to analyze parameters like distance and sight conditions in a rich multipath environment. This paper describes the results and conclusions derived from a set of field-operational tests along a track, with modules operating with ITS-G5. While the results confirm the expectation that field-operational tests aren't reproducible on a quantitative level, we have gained insight into fundamental constraints on the channel parameters and approaches towards emulation in virtual environment. Employing omni-directional roof-mounted antennas, we have observed reliable communication links for ranges up to 250 meters, independent of sight conditions.

The bottleneck in OTA testing electrically large equipment is the large number of sources required for sufficient angular density. That is, if the sources are active. In that case, high-bandwidth, high-frequency equipment with excellent stability, processing power, and configurability is needed per antenna element. The costs of scaling up the current MIMO OTA configuration to higher frequencies and/or large equipment is prohibitive. In case passive radiators are used, the maximum control speed is determined by the maximum expected Doppler frequency. Such performance is order of magnitudes cheaper, even for large numbers of elements. In this contribution, we will present a new OTA concept that uses passively radiating reconfigurable structures and is inherently bi-directional. The concept that we call Projection-OTA, accommodates test objects in FR1 that are electrically large to very large and shows good prospects for emulating beam dynamics for testing 5G NR in FR2. Whether such passive structures will be made up by reflect arrays, meta-surfaces, or even intelligent surfaces is to be determined. We will discuss the prospects and limitations of this concept.