Effect of attack angle on the electromagnetic wave transmission characteristics in the hypersonic plasma sheath of a re-entry vehicle

The attack angle may greatly affect the hypersonic plasma sheaths around the re-entry vehicle,thereby affecting the transmission characteristics of electromagnetic(EM)waves in the sheaths.In this paper,we propose an integrated three-dimensional(3D)model with various attack angles and realistic flying conditions of radio attenuation measurement C-II(RAM C-II)re-entry tasks for analyzing the effect of the attack angle on the transmission characteristics of EM waves in the sheaths.It is shown that the electron density and collision frequency of the sheath on the windward side can be increased by an order of magnitude with the increase of the attack angle.Meanwhile,the thickness of the sheath on the leeward side is increased where the electron density and collision frequency are reduced.The EM waves are mainly reflected on the windward plasma sheath due to the cutoff effect,and the radio-frequency(RF)blackout is mitigated if the antenna is positioned on the leeward side.Thus,by planning the trajectory properly and installing the antenna accordingly during the re-entry,it is possible to provide an approach for mitigation of the RF blackout problem to an extent.

Improvement of atmospheric jet-array plasma uniformity assisted by artificial neural networks

Atmospheric pressure plasma jet(APPJ)arrays have shown a potential in a wide range of applications ranging from material processing to biomedicine.In these applications,targets with complex three-dimensional structures often easily affect plasma uniformity.However,the uniformity is usually crucially important in application areas such as biomedicine,etc.In this work,the flow and electric field collaborative modulations are used to improve the uniformity of the plasma downstream.Taking a two-dimensional sloped metallic substrate with a 10°inclined angle as an example,the influences of both flow and electric field on the electron and typical active species distributions downstream are studied based on a multi-field coupling model.The electric and flow fields modulations are first separately applied to test the influence.Results show that the electric field modulation has an obvious improvement on the uniformity of plasma while the flow field modulation effect is limited.Based on such outputs,a collaborative modulation of both fields is then applied,and shows a much better effect on the uniformity.To make further advances,a basic strategy of uniformity improvement is thus acquired.To achieve the goal,an artificial neural network method with reasonable accuracy is then used to predict the correlation between plasma processing parameters and downstream uniformity properties for further improvement of the plasma uniformity.An optional scheme taking advantage of the flexibility of APPJ arrays is then developed for practical demands.