Numerical and experimental studies on the effectiveness of time-varying electromagnetic fields in reducing electron density

Abstract

Abstract When an aircraft or a hypersonic vehicle re-enters the atmosphere, the plasma sheath generated can severely attenuate electromagnetic wave signals, causing the problem of communication blackout. A new method based on time-varying E ×  B fields is proposed to improve on the existing static E ×  B fields and mitigate the radio blackout problem. The use of the existing method is limited by the invalid electron density reduction resulting from current density j = 0 A m−2 in plasma beyond the Debye radius. The most remarkable feature is the introduction of a time-varying electric field to increase the current density in the plasma to overcome the Debye shielding effect on static electric field. Meanwhile, a magnetic field with the same frequency and phase as the electric field is applied to ensure that the electromagnetic force is always acting on the plasma in one direction. In order to investigate the effect of time-varying E ×  B fields on the plasma electron density distribution, two directions of voltage application are considered in numerical simulation. The simulation results indicate that different voltage application methods generate electromagnetic forces in different directions in the plasma, resulting in repulsion and vortex effects in the plasma. A comparison of the vortex effect and repulsion effect reveals that the vortex effect is better at reducing the electron density. The local plasma electron density can be reduced by more than 80% through the vortex effect, and the dimensions of the area of reduced electron density reach approximately 6 cm × 4 cm, meeting the requirements of electromagnetic wave propagation. Besides, the vortex effect of reducing the electron density in RAM-C (radio attenuation measurements for the study of communication blackout) reentry at an altitude of 40 km is analyzed. On the basis of the simulation results, an experiment based on a rectangular-window discharge device is proposed to demonstrate the effectiveness of the vortex effect. Experimental results show that time-varying E ×  B fields can reduce the electron density in plasma of 3 cm thickness by 80% at B = 0.07 T and U 0 = 1000 V. The investigations confirm the effectiveness of the proposed method in terms of reducing the required strength of the magnetic field and overcoming the Debye shielding effect. Additionally, the method is expected to provide a new way to apply a magnetic window in engineering applications.