Electron Density Depletion in Reentry Plasma Flows Using Pulsed Electric Fields
This paper presents a fully-coupled simulation demonstrating that high-voltage pulsed electric fields can effectively mitigate reentry communication blackout by depleting electron density in the plasma sheath, thereby reducing signal attenuation from 60% to 4% with a lightweight, feasible power system, while revealing that ion kinetics primarily govern the sheath's topology.