Design of a radio-frequency transceiver coil for landmine detection in Colombia by nuclear quadrupole resonance

Lorena Cardona; Hideo Itozaki; Jovani Jiménez; Nelson Vanegas; Hideo Sato-Akaba

doi:10.1016/j.heliyon.2020.e03242

Design of a radio-frequency transceiver coil for landmine detection in Colombia by nuclear quadrupole resonance

Heliyon. 2020 Feb 1;6(1):e03242. doi: 10.1016/j.heliyon.2020.e03242. eCollection 2020 Jan.

Authors

Lorena Cardona^{1

2}, Hideo Itozaki³, Jovani Jiménez², Nelson Vanegas⁴, Hideo Sato-Akaba³

Affiliations

¹ Department of Mechanical Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, Institución Universitaria Pascual Bravo, Calle 73 No. 73A - 226, Colombia.
² Department of Computation and Decision Science, School of Mines, Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Carrera 80 No. 65-223, Medellin, Antioquia, Colombia.
³ Department of Systems Innovation, Graduate School of Engineering Science, Osaka University, Toyonaka, Osaka 560-8531, Japan.
⁴ Department of Mechanical Engineering, School of Mines, Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Carrera 64 No. 63-120, Medellin, Antioquia, Colombia.

Abstract

This paper shows the design of a radio-frequency transceiver coil for landmine detection in Colombia by nuclear quadrupole resonance (NQR). The radio-frequency transceiver coil is of great importance as it is responsible for exciting the target explosive and for picking up the weak NQR signal; however, little detail is found on the literature about its design. The strategy followed on this work consisted on constructing and experimentally comparing five different radio-frequency transceiver coils, whose dimensions were selected according to four design parameters: noise rejection, magnetic flux density, coil sensitivity, and quality factor; taking into account the characteristics of landmines in Colombia, the second country most affected by anti-personnel mines in the world. The constructed coils were experimentally compared using a portable system and with three of them, the system was capable of detecting 200 g ammonium nitrate (the main substance used in Colombian landmines) up to 3 cm from the coil within 12 s, with a steady-state free precession pulse sequence. Conclusions from this work could help to guide RF coil design in other works that apply NQR for remote detection of substances in non-shielded environments and to direct future research about landmine detection in Colombia.

Keywords: Electromagnetism; Explosives – detection; Land mines – detection; Nuclear physics; Nuclear quadrupole resonance; Transceiver coil.