Design and Experimental Evaluation of a Novel Type Radar Reflector for use in the Marine Environment.

The octahedral radar reflector is the one most commonly used today in marine applications, for purposes of increasing the Radar Cross Section (RCS) of small vessels at sea. The use of radar reflectors provides greater radar detection distances, therefore contributes to navigation safety. The octahedral reflector has proven to be relatively inefficient, since its RCS values do not remain fairly constant, but show significant variations resulting to changes of the angle of incidence. RCS variations in certain angles of incidence produce nulls, where the radar detection range is almost zero, thus increasing the probability of collision incidents at sea. The scope of this research is to design and evaluate more RCS efficient radar reflector types compared with the operational performance of the octahedral in X-band, thus contribute to navigation safety in the marine environment. Three new reflector models have been designed and manufactured and their RCS was compared with the octahedral reflector RCS in the Military Technological College (MTC) radar lab (in X-band). For the octahedral reflector’s and new models’ size and weight, the International Maritime Organization (IMO) Resolution MSC.164 (78) revised performance standards of radar reflectors have been considered. As a result of the measurements, the reflector model with 30 triangular trihedral elements, with side length of 13 cm, has proven to be the most efficient.