A microwave weapon is a device that uses high power electromagnetic wavesto deal damage to targets such as electronic equipment, communication systems, drones, satellites or even people in certain cases. A new weapon of this type, with a power equivalent to the electromagnetic energy released by a nuclear explosionis being developed by Chinese researchers. According to the South China Morning Post, it is relatively compact and could become a decisive factor in anti-drone and anti-satellite military operations.
This high-powered microwave weapon, HPM for its acronym in English, is under development and has not left the laboratoryso it has not yet been tested in real conditions. Weapons like this can cause significant damage and even destroy anything electronic, making them necessary in modern military operations.
Many nations around the world are developing their own HPMs. USA announced that it plans to deploy some in the Indo-Pacific region this year. These weapons could be used to shoot down Chinese satellites in the event of a conflict between the two superpowers.
In most cases, HPMs use a dish-shaped antennawith multiple degrees of rotation, to attack chosen targets. However, the new Chinese HPM uses instead phased array transmission technology.
This, according to researchers from the National University of Defense Technology in Changsha and of Northwestern Institute of Nuclear Technology in Xi’anallows ‘focusing energy with precision, increasing its effective range and enhancing destructive effects, allowing simultaneous attacks on multiple targets‘.
This type of setup has long been considered impractical as it tends to be unstable. However, Chinese researchers claim to have overcome this problem, even allowing produce microwaves with a power close to 1 gigawatt (GW).
According to the group of researchers, the technology produces rotating electromagnetic waves that can change to more stable states and are evenly distributed over eight independent channels to phased array antennas.
This is achieved using a single power divider the size of a home pedestal fan. By doing this, the HPM can issue 80,000 volts per meter. This is comparable to the electromagnetic pulses generated by nuclear weapons explosions.. According to the team, the high-performance power divider has been tested more than 5,000 times at full power with little or no wear or other apparent long-term damage.
Furthermore, after this resistance test, the waveforms generated by the HPM divider remain unchanged. Not only that, but the operating efficiency of this eight-way power divider reached the 96.6%and the maximum capacity of its power threshold could far exceed 1 GW.