B-Scan in a Reverberation Chamber

Abstract

In this paper, the B-scan technique is applied to a reverberation chamber (RC) for the first time to characterize the time-domain behavior of the chamber. Based on B-scan measurement results, three things are studied in this paper. 1) The statistical behavior of the fields in the time domain is investigated, and it is found that the received power of the impulse response follows chi-square distribution with one degree of freedom. 2) The stirrer efficiency is quantified based on the equivalent total scattering cross section (TSCS) of stirrers, and this definition is not sensitive to the antenna position and load in the RC. It is shown that the stirrer efficiency defined in this paper provides, for the first time, a quantitative way to evaluate the stirrer design and the chamber performance. 3) A time-gating technique is proposed which provides an alternative method to eliminate the early time response and obtain the chamber transfer function of the RC accurately. This could be potentially used to increase the stirrer efficiency without changing the stirrers physically. It is demonstrated that the B-scan technique is a very useful approach for the study and evaluation of an RC.