Experimental Study on Protection Performance of the Plasma Array against the NEMP

Strong electromagnetic pulse (EMP) may lead to serious damage once it is coupled into the interior of the electronic system. As a kind of special electromagnetic medium, plasma has the ability of shielding strong EMP. Therefore, EMP protection technology based on the plasma is of pratical significance. The experimental setup of the interaction between the nuclear electromagnetic pulse (NEMP) and the plasma based on a one-layer cylindrical plasma array is built. Combined with the density distribution characteristics, the protection performance of the plasma array against the NEMP is studied. The results indicate that the protection performance of the plasma array against the TE polarization NEMP is better than that against the TM one. For both TE and TM polarization NEMP, the one-layer cylindrical plasma array can reduce the transmission pulse energy greatly and the energy attenuation is up to 10dB when the electron density is 8.5x10(16) m(-3).