Virtual Prototyping of Directed Energy Weapons

Abstract

This paper reports on RF sources that have been virtually prototyped with the Improved Concurrent Electromagnetic Particle-in-Cell (ICEPIC) code. ICEPIC simulates from first principles (Maxwell’s equations and Lorenz’s force law) the electrodynamics and charged particle dynamics of the RF-producing part of the system. Our simulations focus on two classes of Lband sources: giga-watt, 100ns length pulse sources and 100s of kilo-watt long pulse sources (>100 milliseconds). Such simulations require enormous computational resources. These simulations successfully expose undesirable features of these sources and help us to suggest improvements.