Sensing that keeps working through dust, steam, and darkness

An FMCW radar sweeps a chirp of frequencies and measures the beat between transmitted and reflected signals: range falls out of the frequency difference, velocity out of the Doppler shift, and range resolution is set by chirp bandwidth. The engineering work is in configuring chirps for your geometry, then processing honestly — clutter mapping to ignore fixed structure, CFAR detection to keep false alarms bounded, and tracking filters to turn raw detections into stable object reports. Sensors mount in IP-rated housings and talk to the rest of the system over CAN, RS-485, or Ethernet.

We validate against the real environment, not a clean lab: actual material surfaces for level measurement, real dust loading, real traffic patterns. Success is measured in detection probability and false-alarm rate over weeks of operation, with radar data feeding your PLC or SCADA like any other well-behaved instrument. Where radar alone is ambiguous, it pairs naturally with cameras or other sensors through fusion.

Radar feasibility starts on site, because the environment is the sensor's specification. We look at where the sensor can mount, what sits inside the beam — ladders, agitators, structural steel, conveyor frames — and what the target is made of, since low-reflectivity materials such as dry plastics or fine powders return less signal than metal or water. Where possible we install a candidate module for a short trial and record raw detections through normal operation, including the messy periods: filling, cleaning, shift changes. That recording tells us the required chirp configuration and filtering, and whether a different mounting position or a second sensor would remove ambiguity before the design is fixed.

Product integrations extend the work into firmware and compliance. We write the radar processing to run on the module's processor or a microcontroller, with configurable detection zones, hysteresis, and reporting rates so one build serves many installations. Off-the-shelf modules typically carry regulatory approval for their band, and antenna or radome changes can affect it, so we design enclosures and radomes with that in mind and test them rather than assume — radome material and thickness change the beam more than expected. Handover includes the firmware source, a tuning guide explaining each parameter, and a commissioning checklist so field technicians can set zones and verify detection on site without an engineer present.