Relationship between the velocity of hypersonic vehicles and the transmission efficiency of radio waves

ABSTRACT

Analyzing the flow field distributions around a near-space blunt-cone vehicle at different flight speeds, we observe that, when the flight speed exceeds a certain threshold, the relationship between the flow field density and the vehicle speed presents a characteristic opposite to that at the flight condition of the speed lower than the threshold. On this basis, the Runge–Kutta method is applied to solve the ray equations in non-uniform plasma, in which the electron density at any computing point is obtained by the Lagrange interpolation based on the discrete data of the flow field. Then the EM wave attenuation in the sheath is determined by the subsection integral method combining with the electromagnetic theory. The numerical results also show that when the flight velocity is lower than the threshold, the energy transfer efficiency of the EM waves decreases with the increase of the vehicle velocity. However, when the flight speed is greater than the threshold, the energy transfer efficiency increases as the vehicle speed increases. This conclusion will be helpful to further understand the EM wave propagation characteristics for hypersonic vehicles, and to provide a reference for the channel selection of antennas.

Additional information

Funding

This work is supported by the National Natural Scientific Foundation of China [grant numbers 61571348, 61401344].