Experiment on protection performance of plasma array to 6GHz high-power microwave

Abstract

For purpose of the electromagnetic pulse (EMP) protection research, a double-layer barrier of cylindrical plasma array was designed, and its protective performance to 6GHz high-power microwave (HPM) was conducted experimentally. Combining the distribution of the discharge plasma array, the shielding effectiveness of the double-layer plasma on 6GHz HPM pulse was studied. The main research contents and conclusions are as follows: The transmission energy of HPM decreased as the increase of plasma electron density, indicating an improved protection effect, with both double-layer and single-layer plasma array. Besides, the results showed that the transmission attenuation of HPM in double-layer structure was greater than that in single-layer structure because of the interlayer reflection. In addition, an interesting phenomenon was discovered during the experiment, which was that the boundary plasma units had a significant impact on the HPM transmission. The shielding effect of HPM was better with opening seven plasma units than that with opening whole plasma array. Finally, the spectral characteristics and transmission coefficients of the HPM were presented by Fourier transform, and the results of the protective performance were consistent with the above-mentioned time-domain analysis. The experiment results in this paper are of great significance in protecting against HPM based on plasma.