Shielding properties of an ensemble of thin, infinitely long,parallel wires over a lossy half space

A determination of the total electric field produced by an ensemble of thin, infinitely long, parallel wire scatterers over a flat lossy half space illuminated by a plane wave whose polarization is parallel to both the wires and the interface is presented. By invoking the thin wire idealization, a matrix equation is obtained for determining the currents on each wire, from which the total electric field is obtained. Several plots are given to show how the wires' radii, the earth's conductivity, the incident angle, and the total number of wires affect the shielding for a semicircular shell. In many cases, it is demonstrated that the shielding effectiveness can be as much as 70 dB; for other cases, when the structure is of resonant dimensions, the shielding can be degraded to 20 dB. It is also shown that a wire grid model can give shielding results similar to those of a continuous perfectly conducting structure of similar dimensions