Investigation of Radar Propagation in Buildings: A 10-Billion Element Cartesian-Mesh FETD Simulation

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, rebar) 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 rebar, 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 finite-difference time domain (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.