Study of the multipactor phenomenon using a full-wave integral equation technique

Multipactor effect is a well-known phenomenon of RF breakdown in satellite payloads which degrades components, generates undesirable harmonics, contributes to power dissipation and increases noise in communications. Traditionally, multipactor has been investigated with the aim of obtaining the so-called multipactor threshold voltage, or to present different multipaction detection methods. However, very little attention has been focused on analysing this phenomenon using a multimodal approach. The main goal of this work is to analyse the interaction between a multipactor current and a realistic microwave cavity by means of a rigorous and accurate formulation. For the first time to the authors’ knowledge, a full-wave method based on the 3-D Boundary Integral – Resonant Mode Expansion (BI-RME) technique is proposed to model the aforementioned undesired effect. In this work, the classical formulation used in the 3-D BI-RME method is exploited to achieve a full-wave representation of the multipactor effect in terms of an equivalent multimode network expressed in the form of a generalized admittance matrix.