When you hear the word radar, the first thing that comes to mind is its use in military installations and large navy vessels with towering radar dishes that use microwaves to detect enemy vehicles and mines. However, radars aren’t just used in warfare, but also in other proffessions that have adopted the system for a variety of applications. This is done for the purpose of reducing the effort and time it would take to finish a task.
One such proffession is construction. Companies that use the radars to scan the concrete in order to determine its thickness, which in some buildings is a neccesity for ensuring it is durable enough to support the building’s weight. The scanning process is done by using the microwave’s oscilation to pulse through the concrete. Then this radioactive pulse is converted into visual data on a screen affixed to the handle of the GPRS ground penetrating radar which shows a 3D slice of the concrete to its field operator in real time. This method is also used in MRI scans as well.
Another field that requires the GPRS ground penetrating radar system and its detection abilitues is archaeology which uses it to scan an area that has been reported to have had ancient burial mounds, ancient roads or an ancient city. Its usefulness lies in the ability to collect and record underlying archaeological features impossible to discern using traditional field methods.
Now that you know some of the fileds that utilize this piece of equipment, you might be interested in how exactly it works. Well, firstly, the radar works by using a nondestructive type of electromagnetic radiation, which belongs to the microwave type of the radio spectrum. Secondly, it sends the microwaves through an object or liquid and the microwave then bounces back and reflects the inside of the object or liquid and then is converted to visual data.
This type of radiation is non-ionizing which is considerably safer than other types of radiation. However it can still cause a minor injury, so when handling a machine that uses microwaves, it is advised that the user never points the microwave antenna towards themselves or others.
How deep the radar goes depends on both the material it is scanning and the frequency of the microwave antenna. For applications such as locating rebar or conduits in concrete, higher frequencies are used, whereas lower frequencies are used for soil and other less dense materials.