Investigation of radar propagation in buildings: A 10 billion element Cartesian-mesh FETD simulation

In this paper large scale full-wave simulations are performed to investigate radar wave propagation inside buildings. In principle, a radar system combined with sophisticated numerical methods for inverse problems can be used to determine the internal structure of a building. The composition of the walls (cinder block, re-bar) may effect the propagation of the radar waves in a complicated manner. In order to provide a benchmark solution of radar propagation in buildings, including the effects of cinder block and re-bar, we performed large scale full wave simulations using a finite element time domain (FETD) method. This particular FETD implementation is tuned for the special case of an orthogonal Cartesian mesh and hence resembles FDTD in accuracy and efficiency. The method was implemented on a general-purpose massively parallel computer. In this paper we briefly describe the radar propagation problem, the FETD implementation, and we present results of simulations that used over 10 billion elements.