An Overview of the Research of Plasma Sheath

Abstract

The plasma sheath can be regarded as a model of a phenomenon of spacecraft reentry or hypersonic vehicles and causes so called radio blackout, which interferes with radio signals. This paper gives a survey on several aspects of plasma sheath, including the characteristic of plasma sheath, experiments to deal with the blackout and numerical solutions. The numerical methods includes WKB, finite-difference time-domain method, particle-in-cell method, CFD based method and Monte Carlo method. Some discussions are also presented.