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