An Integrated, Subsurface Characterization System for Real-Time, In-Situ Field Analysis

Federal Manufacturing & Technologies

Chris W. Baumgart, James Creager, John Mathes, Tom Pounds AI VanDeusen, and Barry Warthen .

KCP-613-5742

Published February 1996

Approved for public release; distribution is unlimited.

Prepared Under Contract Number DE-AC04-76-DP00613 for the United States Department of Energy 4lliedSig nal

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DISCLAIMER .-

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AN INTEGRATED, SUBSURFACE CHARACTERIZATION SYSTEM FOR REAL-TIME, IN-SITU FIELD ANALYSIS

Chris W. Baumgart, James Creager, John Mathes, Tom Pounds, AI VanDeusen, and Barry Warthen

Published February 1996

Paper submitted to Fourth International Conference, On-Site Analysis January 22-24,1996 Orlando, FL

&lliedSig nal A E R O S P A C E -

An Integrated, Subsurface Characterization System For Real-Time, In-Situ Field Analysis

Chris W. Baumgart, James Creager, John Mathes, Tom Pounds, A1 VanDeusen, Barry Warthen

AlliedSignal Federal Manufacturing & Technologies* P.O. Box 4339, Station A Albuquerque, NM 87 196

INTRODUCTION

This paper describes current efforts at AlliedSignal Federal Manufacturing & Technologies

(FM&T) to develop and field an in-situ, data analysis platform to acquire, process, and

display site survey data in near real-time. In past years, FM&T has performed a number of

site survey tasks. Each of these surveys was unique in application as well as in the type of

data processing and analysis that was required to extract and visualize useful site

characterization information. However, common to each of these surveys were the

following specific computational and operational requirements:

1. A capability to acquire, process, and visualize the site survey data in the field

2. A capability to perform all processing in a timely fashion (ideally real-time)

Operated for the United States Department of Energy under Contract No. DE-AC04-76- DP006 13. 0 Copyright AUiedSignal, Inc., 1996

3. A technique for correlating (or fusing) data streams from multiple sensors .-

Two more general, but no less important, requirements include system architecture

modularity and positioning capability. System modularity would provide the ability for the

processing of datasets from multiple sensors through the use of a common data format for

all input data. Positioning capability is also a requirement to allow for the registration of

the collected multiple data sets.

There are many potential applications for a workstation that meets all these requirements,

providing in-situ, real-time survey data analysis. These include:

1. Survey, evaluation, and remediation of numerous Department of Defense and

Department of Energy waste sites

2. Real-time detection and characterization of unexploded ordnance and landmines

3. Survey, evaluation, and remediation of industrial waste sites

4. Location of underground utility lines

5. Providing law enforcement agencies with real-time surveys of crime scenes

In order to support these subsurface characterization tasks with their real-time, in-situ

requirements, we began an internally funded.development effort in Ey95 to build an

integrated data acquisition, processing, and visualization platform that is capable of

performing in-situ data processing, interpretation, and visualization in real-time.

THE INTEGRATED SUBSURFACE CHARACTERIZATION SYSTEM

The Integrated Subsurface Characterization System (ISCS) is a three-year effort (FY95-

97) which is designed to provide hardware and software elihancements to the subsurface

characterization programs currently being performed at AlliedSignal FM&T/AIbuquerque.

At the present time, our sensor suite consists of 4 different ground penetrating radars

(100-MHz, 300-MHz ground contact radars, a 500-MHz air contact system, and a 1-GHz

air contact system), an EM-3 1 conductivity meter, and a cesium vapor magnetometer.

Figure 1 shows a system concept for the ISCS project. ISCS is a field-portable, analysis

workstation that serves as the focus of the data acquisition, analysis, and interpretation

processes. A common data format will be used to ensure that all data streams viewed by

ISCS will be correctly interpreted and placed in a format that will aid in the registration

and correlation of multiple data streams.

ISCS itself consists of two main components: (1) a hardware component consisting of

specially designed interface boards which are used to port and condition data from the

particular sensor into the wokstation and (2) a software component consisting of data

analysis and feature extraction codes which are written uniquely for each type of sensor,

and data fusion and visualization codes that are written uniquely for each type of

application. Data archival will also be an important task provided by ISCS.

FY95 ACCOMPLISHMENTS

The fust year of the ISCS project was heavily oriented towards the acquisition of sensors

and the collection of field data to provide a working database of subsurface data. Surveys

that were performed included (1) a survey of a classified waste IandfU at Sandia

National Labs; (2) two surveys in support of injected barrier experiments, one at Sandia

and one at Hanford; and (3) a survey in support of a murder investigation carried out by

the Drug Enforcement Agency. The surveys in (1) and (2) are the subject of two poster

papers also being presented at this conference.

We subsequently used these site survey data to develop basic data registration and feature

extraction routines for ISCS. We also developed a generic hardware interface that allows

ISCS to acquire data directly off the commercial off-the-shelf radar units that were used

for the surveys.

Figure 2 shows an example of some of the site survey data that was collected last year at

Sandia’s Technical Area II. This particular waste landfill was used by Sandia for 40 years

and contains a significant amount of classified buried waste from the weapons

development program. Sandia now has a requirement to assess the magnitude of the

:I

effort required to remediate this site. AlliedSignal performed a survey of this site with

100- and 300-MHz ground penetrating radar. The figure shows processed (not raw) data

from the 300-MHz survey. In this figure, multiple burial sites down to 10 feet can easily

be seen. The primary purpose of a survey such as this one is to provide an estimate of the

amount of buried waste that will have to be dealt with during remediation:

Figure 3 shows an example of some of the data that was collected in support of a Sandia

experiment on injected barriers used for waste containment. This experiment was

designed to assess the viability of a subsurface grout injection technique that can be used

to form subsurface barriers to contain buried waste or to mitigate waste plumes.

AlliedSignal’s task was to perform post-injection characterization of the barriers to

determine the extent, depth, and integrity of the barriers. This Figure shows an example

of some of the GPR data collected on one of the injected barriers.

PROJECT STATUS

Currently, ISCS consists of:

A Pentium-based analysis workstation and the capability to acquire data directly off

the 100- and 300-MHz radar units.

Feature extraction and signal processing routines to process the collected radar data.

A survey wheel to provide data registration capability.

A commercial plotting package to display raw and processed data.

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In FY96, we expect to:

0 Build additional hardware interfaces for the other sensor systems

Define a common data format for collected sensor data

Develop sensor fusion methodologies to fuse the multiple sensor data streams

Design processing algorithms specific to the applications we are performing (waste

site versus injected barriers versus UXO/mines)

Incorporate GPS survey capability

Improve our data visualization capability

SUMMARY

Development of the ISCS system will continue throughout the rest of FY96, with a

working prototype completed by August 1996. When completed, ISCS will provide a

capability to acquire, process, and visualize survey data in the field in near real-time. Data

processing software will be customized for the particular sensor or application need.

I

GSSI SIR-1OA GPR ANTENNAS:

SURVEY WHEEL &A 4 \ OTHER POSITION

INFO//

FIELD PC FOR

/ n n \ / I mwl

Band Removal Hilbert Transform Digitization FFT Multi-channels FIWIIR Filters I .................................................................................................................

Feature Extraction Data registration w/ other channels User interface Data display Data archive to Disk

~ - 3 1 CONDUCTIVITY PROB

ASCS2.PPT 7/11/95

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Figure 1. Architecture for the Integrated Subsurface Characterization System (ISCS)

Technical Area 2 - Sandia National Laboratories Hilbert Transform Magnitude

300 MHz GPR

-100 -80 -60 -40 -20 0 20 40 60 . 80 ' 100 ' I20 . 140 ' 160 ' 180 ' 260 ' 220 ' 240 ' 260 ' 2bO ' 3bO ' 3iO ' 3iO ' 360 ' 3iO ' 460 '

Eas t-W e s t (feet) I

Figure 2. Example of survey data collected at Sandia's Technical Area 11 classified waste landfill &lliedSignal

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D e P t h

Individual injections (top layer example) Instrumentation cables

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,100

,200

1300

,400

,500

S a m P 1 e

0 20 40 60 80 100 120 140 160 180 200 220 240 260 280 300 320 340 360 Track Angle [Degrees]

Figure 3. Example of survey data collected on a subsurface injected barrier