An Efficient Volumetric SBR Method for Electromagnetic Scattering From In-Homogeneous Plasma Sheath

Abstract

A novel volumetric shooting and bouncing ray (VSBR) method is first proposed to analyze the electromagnetic scattering from in-homogeneous plasma sheath. The propagation of electromagnetic waves in a plasma sheath can be accurately traced by using rays in volumetric-meshed cells. The algorithm starts with tracking the ray tubes in the plasma sheath with high efficiency. Then, the reflection and transmission coefficients can be obtained by using the theory of electromagnetic waves' propagation in the lossy medium. At last, the scattering far fields can be easily calculated by taking the scattering field of each tube into consideration. As a comparison, the state-of-the-art high-frequency algorithms cannot deal with in-homogeneous lossy mediums of rapid varying. Meanwhile, it should also be noted that the proposed method can provide a more accurate result for analyzing layered plasma sheath than traditional high-frequency methods. Moreover, in this paper, the cubes' model with a different dielectric parameter, blunt cone, and hyper-sonic models are calculated with the finite-difference time-domain method (FDTD), the volume-surface integral equation method (VSIE), the traditional high-frequency method, and the proposed method. The results demonstrate the accuracy and efficiency of the proposed method.

Keywords

• Inhomogeneous plasma
• shooting and bouncing ray
• tetrahedron
• plasma sheath