The Proportionality Between Charge Acceleration and Radiation from a Generic Wire Object

Abstract

The Lienard-Wichert potentials show that radiation is caused by charge acceleration. The question arises about where charge acceleration occurs on the most basic of antennas, a center-fed, perfectly conducting dipole, for which there are two obvious causes. One is the feedpoint exciting voltage that sets into motion an outward-propagating charge and current wave at light speed c in the medium. A second is at the dipole ends where the outgoing wave is totally reflected producing a change in charge speed of 2c. In addition there is the decreasing amplitude of the propagating wave with distance due to its partial reflection along the wire. That reflected charge also undergoes a speed change of 2c. This is the reason why the decay of current flowing along a straight wire antenna has been attributed as being due to radiation. Radiation caused by these and other kinds of charge acceleration due to resistive loads, right-angle bends, and radius steps are investigated. These phenomena are examined primarily in the time-domain where they are more observably separable in time and space than in the frequency domain. The current and charge induced on an impulsively excited wire antenna and its broadside radiated E-field are computed using a time-domain, integral-equation model. The computed results are used to derive a numerical relationship between the amount of accelerated charge and its radiated field. This relationship is denoted as an Acceleration Factor (AF ) that is obtained for various charge-accelerating features of a generic wire object are normalized to that of the exciting source for comparison with their respect speed changes.