A Method to Evaluate the Performance of Ultra-Wideband Antennas for the Radiation of High-Power Electromagnetic Pulses

Abstract

In this communication, a time-frequency joint method is proposed to evaluate the performance of ultrawideband (UWB) antennas for the radiation of high-power (HP) electromagnetic pulses. First, conventional antenna parameters, such as the efficiency, gain, and so on, are translated to UWB pulsed antennas from the energy perspective, so as to get several scalar antenna parameters, since energy in one pulse is finite. Thus, the power-spectrum weighted efficiency ( <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\eta _{e}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> ), directivity ( <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$D_{e}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> ), and gain ( <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$G_{e}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> ) are proposed. Then, several electromagnetic norms of the radiating pulse are selected to characterize the sensitive parameters of the equipment under test (EUT). Based on these, several other scalar antenna parameters are proposed, which are the effective potential gain ( <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$G_{ep}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> ), pulse sharpening factor ( <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">PSF</i> ), and peaking impulse gain ( <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$G_{PI}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> ). Thus, a set of time-domain scalar criteria are proposed to evaluate the performance of HP-UWB antennas. These criteria can be calculated with the frequency functions of conventional antenna parameters, which demonstrate the inherent properties of one antenna. Finally, the performance of two kinds of typical HP-UWB antennas, namely the impulse radiating antenna and the combined antenna, is measured and compared with the proposed method. It indicates that, with the proposed method, one can not only get the inherent properties of one antenna in the frequency domain but also quantitatively compare the performance of different antennas with a given exciting pulse in the time domain with the proposed scalar antenna parameters.