A Fast Echo Evaluation Method of Chaff Cloud
Yu Le Liu Songhua Zuo Yanchun
School of P. O. E. School of P. O. E
Xidian University Xidian University
Xi’an, China Xi’an, China
1491047697@qq.com shliu@mail.xidian.edu.cn
Abstract—Echo estimation of chaff cloud before they are put
into use is a crucial issue in anti-electromagnetic interference. It
is quite difficult to calculate the echo of the chaff cloud that
contains millions of chaff elements. Comparing with the general
numerical method in time-domain, a more efficient method to
calculate the echo of the chaff cloud is proposed in this paper. A
superposition strategy is introduced to calculate the echo by
summarizing the echo of a single chaff element that is pre-stored
in the database. This strategy is available when the interval
length between any two elements in cloud is larger than two
wavelengths. Then, we give the echo of the chaff cloud illustrated
by two modulated incident signals.
Keywords—chaff; time-domain; fast method; superposition;
echo signal.
I. INTRODUCTION
Chaff is a very effective jammer used in electromagnetic
countermeasures. The chaff cloud usually consists of a large
number of conducting wires cut to half-wavelength to resonate
at radar frequencies. It can be used against anti-ship or anti-
aircraft missiles. Many researchers do their effort to study how
to discriminate a real target, e.g., an aircraft, and a chaff cloud.
They can effectively distinguish the target and chaff cloud by
using frequency domain method. For aerial case, a chaff cloud
moves usually at speeds that are different to the speed of the
airplane. Therefore, it is convenient to distinguish the target in
time domain. Before this, one needs obtaining the echo of chaff
cloud using an efficient method. The purpose of this paper is
providing a faster echo estimation method.
In recent years, the radar echo of chaff clouds has been
studied from many angles: Literature [1] considered the
influence of chaff motion on the frequency spectrum. Different
polarizations have been discussed in the literature [2] and [3].
The above is all about frequency domain analysis of chaff.
There are very few literatures about echo evaluation. Literature
[4] calculates the echo of chaff cloud using LFM signal, but its
echo is based on simple formulas rather than electromagnetic
calculations. The fast echo evaluation method in this paper is
based on superposition and echo evaluation of a single chaff is
based on FDTD.
II. METHOD DESCRIPTION
The echo of a chaff cloud is affected by many factors, such
as atmospheric environment, moving speed, and various noises.
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Liu Wei Guo Lixin
School of P. O. E School of P. O. E School of P. O. E
Xidian University Xidian University Xidian University
Xi’an, China Xi’an, China Xi’an, China
yczuoemail@163.com liuwei@mail.xidian.edu.cn lxguo@mail.xidian.edu.cn
Therefore, the actual echo signal of the chaff cloud is very
complicated. The proposed signal model in this paper relies on
the following assumption:
1) The interval length between any two chaff elements in
cloud is larger than two wavelengths.
2) The amplitude and the phase of the scattered signal are not
correlated with each other.
3) The effect of noise on the echo signal is neglected.
4) Doppler frequency shift is not considered.
Based on the assumptions above, the echo is a vector
summation of the echo provided by each elements, the
synthesis echo can be expressed as follow [4]
  j N 
S  Ae   Ak e jk (1)
 k 1

where A is the amplitude and  is the phase of the echo, Ak
and k are the echo amplitude and phase of the k -th chaff
element, N is the number of chaff element. Therefore, the fast
method to calculate echo signal can be divided into the
following steps:
1) A database is established to store the echoes of horizontal
and vertical components of a single chaff element.
2) Calculate the time delay, incident angle, and scattering
angle of each chaff element.
3) Match the corresponding echo signal of each chaff in the
database according to the incident and scattering angles.
4) Sum all the echo according to 1).
III. COORDINATE SYSTEM
In this section, the method how to calculate the incident and
scattering angles of each chaff element is discussed in detail.
First, a global coordinate system is established shown in Fig.1.
Suppose the coordinate system is established at the geometric
center of the chaff cloud. The position of the k -th chaff is
 xk , yk , zk  and its orientation is  k , k  . The orientation of
incident wave and scattering wave are  t , t  and  r ,  r  .
Assuming that the incident wave is a linearly polarized wave
with any polarization angle, we can divide it into horizontal
polarization eh1 and vertical polarization ev1 components.
Similarly, the scattering wave also can be divided into the
horizontal polarization eh 2 and the vertical polarization ev 2
components, which are shown in Fig.1.
When electromagnetic wave illustrates the chaff element, we
assign the direction of the incident wave as z-axis, and assign
 the directions of horizontal eh1 and vertical ev1 polarization
along x-axis and y-axis, which are shown in Fig.2(a). For the
scattering, we take the opposite direction of the scattered wave
along z-axis shown as Fig.2(b). We define the angle between
the direction of the incident wave and the orientation of the
chaff as t , and the angle between the opposite direction of
the scattering wave and the orientation as r . 1 is the angle
between the projections of chaff onto the eh1  ev1 and eh1 .  2
is the angle between the projections of chaff onto the
eh 2  ev 2 plane and eh 2 .
z

d k ,k  Fig. 3. Echo signal of Gaussian.

 y
T t ,t  o Eh 2

Rr ,r 
Eh1 x
Ev 2
Ev1

Fig. 1. Global coordinate system.

nt  nr

 
t d k ,k  r d k ,k 
o ev1 o ev 2
1 2

eh1 eh 2 Fig. 4. Echo signal of chirp.

(a) (b)
Fig. 2. Local coordinate system. V. CONCLUSION
In this paper, a fast echo evaluation method based on
According to the references [5], we can obtain the superposition is used to calculate the echo of the chaff cloud.
relationship between the incident and the scattered field of the This method has proven to be reliable in frequency domain
half-wavelength dipole calculation when interval length between two chaff is larger
 than two wavelengths. This method has great practical
cos( cos  r )
 Eh 2   Le jkr 2 significance in the case of low accuracy.
E    sin  r
 v2  2 rz 0 sin r (2)
VI. ACKNOWLEGE
 cos 1cos 2 sin 1 cos  2   Eh1 
cos  sin  sin  sin    E  Project supported by the National Natural Science
 1 2 1 2   v1 
Foundation of China (Grant No.61871457), the Foundation for
where z0  73.1  , L   /  , wave impedance  =120 , Innovative Research Groups of the National Natural Science
and r is the distance of total path of transmission to reception. Foundation of China (Grant No.61621005).
According to the local coordinate system of a single chaff, we
can get the expression about 1 and  2 . REFERENCES
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