Animation of modeled E-fields for a TM mode wave propagating on a perfect conductor

Modeled E-Field for Surface Wave (TM) Mode on a Perfect Conductor

The animation above shows the modeled E-field for a pair of simple, uncompensated linearly tapered launchers mounted on a smooth, lossless conductor. The structure is excited by coaxial drive at the input of the left launcher. Energy is converted to surface wave, propagated along the central region of the conductor and received by the launcher on the right where it is coaxially terminated.

Colors represent logarithmic E-Field magnitude which spans a very large range. The highest field intensity by far is located in the red and orange region quite close to the central (black) conductor. The other colors; yellow, green and blue represent greatly weaker field intensity but may help show interesting detail of the propagation mode.

The modeling was performed by taking advantage of structure symmetry and halving the model in two axes. Even with these simplifications, this analysis required more than ten hours on a PC with 2 GHz CPU and 2 GBytes of memory.