Technical Papers and Presentations

Illegal immigrants and smugglers frequently use underground tunnels to avoid border security and checkpoints. In addition, the threat of international terrorism has recently made the effort to detect tunnels a national security priority. No single technology and sensing modality is capable of detecting tunnels in all heterogeneous soils environments. The goal of this research is to study and evaluate the feasibility of this approach via a 3D simulation using a finite element method (COMSOL) validated by experimentation. Both simulation and the experimental setup are 1/100 scaled. A versatile tunnel detection technology requires above surface transmitting and receiving antennas.