GPU Ray Tracing Analysis of Plasma Plume Perturbations on Reflector Antenna Radiation Characteristics

During ion thruster operation, electromagnetic waves propagating through the plasma plume undergo absorption and refraction effects. This paper presents a graphics processing unit (GPU) parallel ray tracing (RT) algorithm for inhomogeneous media to analyze plasma plume-induced perturbations on the radiation characteristics of a satellite reflector antenna, substantially improving computational efficiency. This algorithm performs ray path tracing in the plume, with the vertex and central rays in each ray tube assigned to dedicated GPU threads. This enables the parallel computation of electromagnetic wave attenuation, phase, and polarization. By further applying aperture integration and the superposition principle, the influence of the plume on the far-field antenna radiation patterns is efficiently analyzed. Comparison with serial results validates the accuracy of the algorithm for plume calculation, achieving approximately 319 times speed-up for 586,928 ray tubes. Within the 2–5 GHz frequency range, the plume causes amplitude attenuation of less than 3 dB. This study provides an efficient solution for real-time analysis of plume-induced interference in satellite communications.