Radar Cross Section reduction using plasma blobs: 3-D Finite Difference Time Domain simulations

Abstract

Bistatic scattering cross-section or radar cross section (RCS) of a flat plate covered with cold, collisional, steady-state, inhomogeneous plasma blobs have been studied in this paper. We have performed 3-D finite difference time domain (FDTD) simulations for this study which provides a detailed spatio-temporal evolution of electromagnetic fields. The simulation has been performed using a 10 GHz sinusoidal wave for the case of vertical polarization. Two configurations have been studied, firstly a plate covered with a single blob and secondly the same plate covered with several blobs of smaller dimension. The simulation shows several interesting results and confirms that plasma absorber can be successfully used for reducing the scattering cross section of a plate for almost all azimuthal angles. To our knowledge, this is the first detailed three-dimensional computation of bistatic RCS of plasma shielded objects.