Mitigating effect on turbulent scintillation using non-coherent multi-beam overlapped illumination

•Scintillation model of non-coherent multi-beam was proposed.•Mitigating effect on turbulent scintillation of our model was described.•Multi-beam emitting and turbulent simulation experiment system were designed.•Mitigating effect of our model was analysed and verified by experiments. In order to find an effective method to mitigate the turbulent scintillation for applications involved laser propagation through atmosphere, we demonstrated one model using non-coherent multi-beam overlapped illumination. Based on lognormal distribution and the statistical moments of overlapped field, the reduction effect on turbulent scintillation of this method was discussed and tested against numerical wave optics simulation and laboratory experiments with phase plates. Our analysis showed that the best mitigating effect, the scintillation index of overlapped field reduced to 1/N of that when using single beam illuminating, could be obtained using this method when the intensity of N emitting beams equaled to each other.