Investigation of automotive testing in a reverberation chamber

Abstract

Due to the increasing and urgent demands of automotive over-the-air (OTA) and electromagnetic compatibility (EMC) tests, it is necessary to evaluate the performance of a reverberation chamber (RC) loaded by a vehicle under test. Previous works mainly focus on qualitative analyses on the RC performance for a static vehicle. This article realises the idea of using rotated vehicles to improve field uniformity. Two methods are adopted to estimate the number of independent samples and to predict the uncertainty. In addition, the uncertainty is also estimated from many independent simulations. The estimated uncertainties show good agreements. It is shown that the uncertainty can be significantly improved by rotating the vehicle under test using a large turn-table platform. Authors’ results show that the bigger the volume of the vehicle is, the better the improvement is. Besides, the authors find that the restriction of the volume of the vehicle under test can be relaxed in automotive tests by utilising the vehicle as a rotating mode stirrer. In addition, it is found that the Weibull distribution provides the best fit to the field of RC working near the lowest usable frequency (LUF) for all the cases.