Plasma stealth

Plasma stealth is a proposed process that uses ionized gas (plasma) to reduce the radar cross section (RCS) of an aircraft. Interactions between electromagnetic radiation and ionized gas have been extensively studied for a variety of purposes, including the possible concealment of aircraft from radar that plasma stealth theorizes. While it is theoretically possible to reduce an aircraft's RCS by wrapping the airframe in plasma, it may be very difficult to do so in practice. Various methods might plausibly be able to produce a layer or cloud of plasma around an airframe, from "simple" electrostatic or RF discharges to more exotic possibilities like laser-produced plasmas ^[1].

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First claims

Despite the apparent technical difficulty of designing a plasma stealth device for combat aircraft, there are claims that a system was offered for export by Russia in 1999. In January of 1999, the Russian ITAR-TASS news agency published an interview with Doctor Anatoliy Koroteyev, the director of the Keldysh Research Center (FKA Scientific Research Institute for Thermal Processes), who talked about the plasma stealth device developed by his organization. The claim was particularly interesting in light of the solid scientific reputation of Dr. Koroteyev and the Institute for Thermal Processes, which is one of the top scientific research organizations in the world in the field of fundamental physics. [see "Russian scientists created revolutionary technologies for reducing radar visibility of aircraft", by Nikolay Novichkov, ITAR-TASS, January 20, 1999].

The Journal of Electronic Defense reported that "plasma-cloud-generation technology for stealth applications" developed in Russia reduces an aircraft's RCS by a factor of 100. According to this June 2002 article, the Russian plasma stealth device has been tested aboard a Sukhoi Su-27IB fighter-bomber. The Journal also reported that similar research into applications of plasma for RCS reduction is being carried out by Accurate Automation Corporation (Chattanooga, Tennessee) and Old Dominion University (Norfolk, Virginia) in the U.S.; and by Dassault Aviation (Saint-Cloud, France) and Thales (Paris, France). ["Russia Working on Stealth Plasma", by Michal Fiszer and Jerzy Gruszczynski, Journal of Electronic Defense, June 2002].

Plasma and its properties

A plasma is a quasineutral (total electrical charge is close to zero) mix of ions (atoms which have been ionized, and therefore possess a net charge), electrons, and neutral particles (possibly including un-ionized atoms). Not all plasmas are fully ionized. Almost all the matter in the universe is plasma: solids, liquids and gases are uncommon away from planetary bodies. Plasmas have many technological applications, from fluorescent lighting to plasma processing for semiconductor manufacture.

Plasmas can interact strongly with electromagnetic radiation: this is why plasmas might plausibly be used to modify an object's radar signature. Interaction between plasma and electromagnetic radiation is strongly dependent on the physical properties or parameters of the plasma, most notably, the temperature and density of the plasma. Plasmas cover a wide range of values in both temperature and density; plasma temperatures range from close to absolute zero and to well beyond 10⁹ kelvins (for comparison, tungsten melts at 3700 kelvins), and plasma may contain less than one particle per cubic metre, or be denser than lead. For a wide range of parameters and frequencies, plasma is electrically conductive, and its response to low-frequency electromagnetic waves is similar to that of a metal: a plasma simply reflects incident low-frequency radiation. The use of plasmas to control the reflected electromagnetic radiation from an object (Plasma stealth) is feasible at higher frequency where the conductivity of the plasma allows it to interact strongly with the incoming radio wave, but the wave can be absorbed and converted into thermal energy rather than reflected.

Plasmas support a wide range of waves, but for unmagnetised plasmas, the most relevant are the Langmuir waves, corresponding to a dynamic compression of the electrons. For magnetised plasmas, many different wave modes can be excited which might interact with radiation at radar frequencies.

Plasmas on aerodynamic surfaces

Plasma layers around aircraft have been considered for purposes other than stealth. There are many research papers on the use of plasma to reduce aerodynamic drag. In particular, electrohydrodynamic coupling can be used to accelerate air flow near an aerodynamic surface. One paper^[2] considers the use of a plasma panel for boundary layer control on a wing in a low-speed wind tunnel. This demonstrates that it is possible to produce a plasma on the skin of an aircraft. However, it is not clear whether the plasmas generated in these aerodynamics experiments could be used to reduce radar cross-section.

Absorption of EM radiation

When electromagnetic waves, such as radar signals, propagate into a conductive plasma, ions and electrons are displaced as a result of the time varying electric and magnetic fields. The wave field gives energy to the particles. The particles generally return some fraction of the energy they have gained to the wave, but some energy may be permanently absorbed as heat by processes like scattering or resonant acceleration, or transferred into other wave types by mode conversion or nonlinear effects. A plasma can, at least in principle, absorb all the energy in an incoming wave, and this is the key to plasma stealth. However, plasma stealth implies a substantial reduction of an aircraft's RCS, making it more difficult (but not necessarily impossible) to detect. The mere fact of detection of an aircraft by a radar does not guarantee an accurate targeting solution needed to intercept the aircraft or to engage it with missiles. A reduction in RCS also results in a proportional reduction in detection range, allowing an aircraft to get closer to the radar before being detected.

The central issue here is frequency of the incoming signal. A plasma will simply reflect radio waves below a certain frequency (which depends on the plasma properties). This aids long-range communications, because low-frequency radio signals bounce between the Earth and the ionosphere and may therefore travel long distances. Early-warning over-the-horizon radars utilize such low-frequency radio waves. Most military airborne and air defense radars, however, operate in the microwave band, where many plasmas, including the ionosphere, absorb or transmit the radiation (the use of microwave communication between the ground and communication satellites demonstrates that at least some frequencies can penetrate the ionosphere). Plasma surrounding an aircraft might be able to absorb incoming radiation, and therefore prevent any signal reflection from the metal parts of the aircraft: the aircraft would then be effectively invisible to radar. A plasma might also be used to modify the reflected waves to confuse the opponent's radar system: for example, frequency-shifting the reflected radiation would frustrate Doppler filtering and might make the reflected radiation more difficult to distinguish from noise.

Control of plasma properties is likely to be important for a functioning plasma stealth device, and it may be necessary to dynamically adjust the plasma density, temperature or composition, or the magnetic field, in order to effectively defeat different types of radar systems. Radars which can flexibly change their transmission frequency might be less susceptible to defeat by plasma stealth technology. Like LO geometry and radar absorbent materials, plasma stealth technology is probably not a panacea against radar.

Plasma stealth technology also faces various technical problems. For example, the plasma itself emits EM radiation. Also, it takes some time for plasma to be re-absorbed by the atmosphere and a trail of ionized air would be created behind the moving aircraft. Thirdly, plasmas (like glow discharges or fluorescent lights) tend to emit a visible glow: this is not necessarily compatible with overall low observability. Furthermore, it is likely to be difficult to produce a radar-absorbent plasma around an entire aircraft traveling at high speed. However, a substantial reduction of an aircraft's RCS may be achieved by generating radar-absorbent plasma around the most reflective surfaces of the aircraft, such as the turbojet engine fan blades, engine air intakes, and vertical stabilizers.

Theoretical work with Sputnik

Due to the obvious military applications of the subject, there are few readily available experimental studies of plasma's effect on the radar cross section (RCS) of aircraft, but plasma interaction with microwaves is a well explored area of general plasma physics. Standard plasma physics reference texts are a good starting point and usually spend some time discussing wave propagation in plasmas.

One of the most interesting articles related to the effect of plasma on the RCS of aircraft was published in 1963 by the IEEE. The article is entitled "Radar cross sections of dielectric or plasma coated conducting spheres and circular cylinders" (IEEE Transactions on Antennas and Propagation, September 1963, pp. 558-569). Six years earlier—in 1957—the Soviets had launched the first artificial satellite. While trying to track Sputnik it was noticed that its electromagnetic scattering properties were different from what was expected for a conductive sphere. This was due to the satellite traveling inside of a plasma shell.

The Sputnik's simple shape serves as an ideal illustration of plasma's effect on the RCS of an aircraft. Naturally, an aircraft would have a far more elaborate shape and be made of a greater variety of materials, but the basic effect should remain the same. In the case of the Sputnik flying through the ionosphere at high velocity and surrounded by a naturally-occurring plasma shell, there are two separate radar reflections: the first from the conductive surface of the satellite itself and the second from the dielectric plasma shell.

The authors of the paper found that a dielectric (plasma) shell may either decrease or increase the echo area of the object. If either one of the two reflections is considerably greater, then the weaker reflection will not contribute much to the overall effect. The authors also stated that the EM signal that penetrates the plasma shell and reflects off the object's surface will drop in intensity while traveling through plasma, as was explained in the previous section.

The most interesting effect is observed when the two reflections are of the same order of magnitude. In this situation the two components (the two reflections) will be added as phasors and the resulting field will determine the overall RCS. When these two components are out of phase relative to each other cancellation occurs. This means that under such circumstances the RCS becomes null and the object is completely invisible to the radar.

It is immediately apparent that performing similar numeric approximations for the complex shape of an aircraft would be difficult. This would require a large body of experimental data for the specific airframe, properties of plasma, aerodynamic aspects, incident radiation, etc. On the other hand, the original computations discussed in this paper were done by a handful of people on an IBM 704 computer made in 1956, and at the time, this was a novel subject with very little research background. So much has changed in science and engineering since 1963 that differences between a metal sphere and a modern combat jet pale in comparison.

A simple application of plasma stealth is the use of plasma as an antenna: metal antenna masts often have large radar cross sections, but a hollow glass tube filled with low pressure plasma can also be used as an antenna, and is entirely transparent to radar when not in use.

See also

• Stealth technology