Study of the Mechanism and Suppression of Group Delay Distortion of a Traveling-Wave Tube Using Eulerian Hydrodynamic Analysis

In this paper, a simplified Eulerian nonlinear beam-wave interaction (BWI) theory of a helix traveling-wave tube (TWT) is developed. Derived from this model, analytic solutions are first obtained by the method of successive approximation. Then, the linear analytic solution of group delay distortion (GDD) is obtained. Subsequently, the mechanism of group delay is studied. It is found that the main mechanism of GDD is the propagation time difference between the wave group and electron beam throughout the BWI region. Furthermore, a series of group delay suppression schemes is discussed by using the mechanism. Finally, the Eulerian formation and the suppression schemes are validated by an in-house code based on the Lagrangian theory. Results show that the analytic solutions of Eulerian model and GDD agree well with the Lagrangian theory in small-signal region. In addition, the suppression schemes are applied to a high-efficiency Ku-band space TWT. The GDD is greatly reduced by approximately 50% with a slightly drop of output power.