An Experimental and Theoretical Investigation of the Plane-Wave Excitation of a Multiwire Cable Harness

Abstract

This paper examines, both experimentally and theoretically, the basic responses at the load ends of a cable harness when the cable harness is exposed to the excitation afforded by exposure to a TEM wave of a pulsed plane-wave array. The theoretical modeling involves the solutions to the appropriate time-dependent multiwire transmission-line equations using source terms reported by Taylor, Satterwhite, and Harrison. Two specific "cable bundles" were examined. One was a single wire harness, which provided a simple, well-defined geometry and resulted in the elimination of many uncertainties in the theoretical modeling appropriate for the experimental investigation. The other was an eight-wire, closely coupled, harness, that was representative of a typical satellite cable harness. In the case of the single-wire harness, the comparison between theory and experiment is excellent. For the case of the multiwire harness, the uncertainties associated with the important capacitance matrix, in particular the capacitance-to-ground of the various wires, effected an order-of-magnitude agreement in the theoretically predicted and experimentally observed responses at the load ends of the individual wires.