Effect of the plasma sheath on the propagation of low frequency radio waves

Abstract

The plasma sheath formed around a hypersonic vehicle traveling through the atmosphere will affect the quality of wireless signals. To fully grasp this effect, it is necessary to comprise the vehicle antennas in the investigations, which is considered in our work. Firstly, the discrete plasma sheath data is generated by using COMSOL. Then, combining the shift-operator Finite-Difference Time-Domain method and numerical methods such as the high-dimensional Lagrange interpolation, an electromagnetic algorithm designed for the discrete plasma sheath data is developed. Based on this, the influence of the plasma sheath on the radio wave propagation is studied under different flight condition. Results show that, due to the influence both of the plasma sheath and of the vehicle antenna, the radio waves exhibit rich propagation behaviors, such as the frequency-band shift and the tail diffraction, etc. Compared with other studies, the results in this paper more approximately reflect the propagation characteristics of radio waves in the hypersonic environment, and can provide a reference for the related applications.

KEYWORDS:

• Propagation characteristics
• plasma sheath
• hypersonic vehicle
• antenna radome

Acknowledgements

We will acknowledge the help in the plasma-sheath simulation from Beijing Research Institute of Mechanical and Electrical Technology. We also acknowledge the support from the Engineering Research Center of semiconductor Power Device Reliability, the Chinese Ministry of Education.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work is financially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China [grant number 61401344] and the Engineering Research Center of semiconductor Power Device Reliability, the Chinese Ministry of Education.