{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/modelling-arbitrary-complex-dielectric","title":"Modelling Arbitrary Complex Dielectric Properties -- an automated implementation for gprMax","arxiv_id":"2109.01928","date":"2021-09-04","proceeding":null,"authors":["Sylwia Majchrowska","Iraklis Giannakis","Craig Warren","Antonios Giannopoulos"],"abstract":"There is a need to accurately simulate materials with complex electromagnetic properties when modelling Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR), as many objects encountered with GPR contain water, e.g. soils, curing concrete, and water-filled pipes. One of widely-used open-source software that simulates electromagnetic wave propagation is gprMax. It uses Yee's algorithm to solve Maxwell's equations with the Finite-Difference Time-Domain (FDTD) method. A significant drawback of the FDTD method is the limited ability to model materials with dispersive properties, currently narrowed to specific set of relaxation mechanisms, namely multi-Debye, Drude and Lorentz media. Consequently, modelling any arbitrary complex material should be done by approximating it as a combination of these functions. This paper describes work carried out as part of the Google Summer of Code (GSoC) programme 2021 to develop a new module within gprMax that can be used to simulate complex dispersive materials using multi-Debye expansions in an automatic manner. The module is capable of modelling Havriliak-Negami, Cole-Cole, Cole-Davidson, Jonscher, Complex-Refractive Index Models, and indeed any arbitrary dispersive material with real and imaginary permittivity specified by the user.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2109.01928v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2109.01928v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"modelling-arbitrary-complex-dielectric","repo_url":"https://github.com/majsylw/gprMax/tree/feature/relaxation","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"gpr","task_name":"GPR"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}