Post pulse recovery of HPM generated plasma at close to atmospheric pressure

摘要

mode of a WR-284 standard waveguide is used to generate a 3 MW, 3 microsecond pulse with a rise time of less than 50 ns that is incident on the dielectric window separating the two environments. The atmospheric side is enclosed in a structure that mimics an open radiation pattern similar to that of current HPM systems. To understand the post-pulse features, two custom multi-standard waveguide couplers were designed to implement and extract a low power 10 GHz CW source into the main waveguide structure while keeping a low insertion loss for the HPM pulse. The results of this power signal (max attenuation values range −10 to −40 dB) along with a 1D plane wave excited plasma model is used to infer the temporal average electron density (specifically the longitudinal integral of the surface plasma density) at a range of pressures and different gases, typically 10–400 torr for air, N