Performance Evaluation of Vibrational Measurements Through mmWave Radars

Thanks to the availability of a significant amount of inexpensive commercial Frequency Modulated Continuous Wave Radar sensors, designed primarily for the automotive domain, it is interesting to understand if they can be used in alternative applications. Radars designed for automotive applications, in fact, thanks to their high transmission frequency, large bandwidth and very short chirp signals, are able to provide sub-millimeter resolution and a large detection bandwidth, to the point that it is here proposed to implement a vibrational analysis of a target and evaluate what information on the vibrations can be extracted, and the performance obtainable. In the present work the use of a commercial Frequency Modulated Continuous Wave radar is described, and the performances achieved in terms of target's displacement and frequency measurement are compared with the measurement results obtained through a laser vibrometer, considered as the reference instrument.