Structural displacement monitoring using ground-based synthetic aperture radar

This study develops a ground-based synthetic aperture radar (GBSAR) imaging system and interferometric processing framework for structural health monitoring (SHM). Radar remote sensing for displacement monitoring plays a vital role in SHM. Radar sensors and, more specifically, GBSAR systems have gained more attention in recent studies due to their capability to overcome the limitations of other contact or non-contact SHM sensors. This paper proposes a three-dimensional SAR imaging system and advanced signal processing scheme to extract continuous (fast) displacement components, such as structural vibrations, and discontinuous (slow) displacements, such as subsidence or uplift, using SAR time-series datasets. Using controlled experiments, this study shows that the developed GBSAR can monitor sub-millimeter displacements with high spatial resolution and 0.02 mm precision in the LOS direction. Moreover, several simulations are carried out to evaluate the proposed displacement monitoring algorithms. Accordingly, the proposed continuous monitoring framework can measure fast LOS displacements with better than 0.03 mm precision by reducing the effects of radar movement, clutters, and disturbances. Also, evaluations on a simulated monitoring scene at 20 m from the GBSAR’s LOS show that the proposed discontinuous displacement monitoring algorithm can estimate 3D displacement vectors with sub-millimeter precision. The results show that the developed GBSAR can be used for repeat-pass LOS displacement monitoring and the proposed algorithms demonstrate high potential for measuring continuous sub-second LOS displacements and long-term 3D displacement vectors.