Extension of a Plane Wave Integral Representation for Fields in Lossy Reverberation Chambers

Abstract

This article develops a theoretical extension of a plane wave integral representation to account for fields inside a reverberation chamber with an arbitrary lossy configuration. It is shown that the presented development can explain a general over-moded reverberation chamber with the anisotropy condition; i.e., each of the six complex field components possesses non-zero mean values and different variances from one another. It is found that the ensemble average of the absolute square of the total field can satisfy the homogeneity property (i.e., being independent of position), despite the correlation between the angular spectrum components of the received field. To the of the best authors knowledge, a detailed physical explanation of a high-loss reverberation chamber based on this extended plane wave integral formulation is not currently available due to the difficulty finding a homogeneity property. The theoretical expressions and physical explanations can not only provide fresh insights into the understanding of a lossy reverberation chamber, but they can also be extended to other non-ideal lossy environments and statistical methods. The measured mean power densities inside a reverberation chamber with a variety of lossy configurations are compared with the values obtained from the power balance method, showing the importance of this theoretical development and several future directions for research.