Design of a metal detector

Sammanfattning: Electromagnetic wave propagation is a well-known phenomenon in the scientific world and when the first telescope was built method of sensing objects excelled afterwords. Research in optical system and infrared is growing day by day but radar system still dominates the world in object sensing. One of the benefits of using electromagnetic waves in a Radar system is that they can create images of areas which cannot be observed with optical light. Radars work on the basic phenomena of an extremely short burst of radio energy which transmit energy that reflects from the object as an echo. This principle is also known as ECHO Principal [13]. This thesis presents a Coffee Can radar system which gives detection of a stationary and moving object. Objects detection is performed on the oscilloscope using a triangular wave transmitted from an antenna, that gets reflected from an object and received on the second antenna. The prototype consists of two antennas one of which is used for transmitting signal and other is used for receiving signal. Voltage control oscillator is used to generate the RF frequency signal and power amplifiers are used before transmitting and receiving the RF signal. The signals are down-converted using a mixer the output of which is observed on an oscilloscope. Detection of the reflected signal can be performed using Doppler shift which can be determined from the velocity of electromagnetic radiation and angular displacement of the reflected waves. The wavelength of the Doppler shift is then used to indicate the detection and ranging of the object. Coffee Can radar operates at 2.4GHz with the output power of 10mW. Triangular wave signal is generated with the help of a wave generator. The radar prototype built in this thesis is used for detection and ranging of two different types of materials. First, is a metal sheet and secondly an aluminum foil.  The detection process is completed by noting the Vpp values reflected from these sheets. Vpp values are measured on the oscilloscope when the signal reflected from aluminum sheet. With the help of a commercial software, aluminum foil presence is detected under the snow. For the future work if the video amplifier is built then the aluminum foil presence can be detected on MATLAB without the help of any commercial software. In future Coffee Can Radar can also be used for surveillance purposes like smart homes, autonomous vehicles and as a jammer. This Radar system can also be used as a data logging system.