Exploring a Directional Measurement Method of Three-Dimensional Electric Field Intensity in the Atmosphere

Abstract

The traditional process of measuring a three-dimensional (3D) electric field in the atmosphere may suffer from limited accuracy of the electric field component intensity due to multiple factors, such as the 3D electric field sensor’s pose change due to the sensor-carrier motion and the non-parallel positions between the 3D electric compass and field sensor’s measurement axes. Thus, this paper proposes a modified 3D electric field directional decomposition algorithm to overcome this problem. Specifically, the developed solution utilizes a parameter identification and fine-tuning scheme that solves the inaccurate measurement problem caused by the non-coaxial 3D positions between the electric field sensor and the compass. The measurement results highlight that the proposed method eliminates the instability of the electric field intensity measurement errors caused by the 3D electric field sensor changes because the measurement accuracy of the corrected electric field component intensity does not change with the sensor’s rotation angle. Our technique reduces the measurement error of the electric field intensity originating from the non-parallel position 3D electronic compass and field sensor measurement axes, further improving the measurement accuracy of the atmospheric field intensity.