A 2-D FDTD Model for Analysis of Plane Wave Propagation Through the Reentry Plasma Sheath

A 2-D finite-difference time domain model was developed to analyze the wideband plane wave propagation characteristics in the reentry plasma sheath at the receiving antenna position. Because of the variation of the flow field, various inhomogeneous structures exist in the plasma sheath, such as electron density irregularities, large-scale ablation particles, and vortex electron density structures, which play important roles in refracting and distorting the electromagnetic wave signals. The proposed model directly included the effects of these inhomogeneous structures. The model used a p-shaped total-field/scattered-field (TF/SF) boundary to introduce the plane wave source to the simulation domain. Based on the current density convolution (JEC) method and the phase matching principle, six 1-D auxiliary propagators were generated to obtain field values at the TF/SF boundary. The convolutional perfectly matched layer was implemented as the absorbing boundary condition of the auxiliary propagator. The efficiency and accuracy of the proposed method were validated by numerical examples.