Analysis of plasma sheath channel characteristics based on the shock tube experiment

Abstract

The plasma sheath channel has a serious impact on the propagation of electromagnetic waves, resulting in the radio blackout problem in aerospace communications. In existing studies, the plasma sheath channel characteristics are analyzed based on computer simulations, lack of real-world experimental verification. Thereby, these studies failed to fully demonstrate the high-dynamics of the plasma sheath channel. In this paper, an experimental communication system based on the shock tube is proposed to investigate the plasma sheath channel. Then, the characteristics of the plasma sheath channel are analyzed based on the experimental results. In particular, the high-dynamic and fast time-varying channel characteristics are verified by analyzing the signal amplitude, signal phase shift and the coherence time. Finally, we show an example of using the presented channel characteristics. A non-stationary signal segmentation method is proposed based on the reversible jump Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithm, which is applicable to the plasma sheath channel signal segmentation.