Measurement of absorption cross section of a lossy object in reverberation chamber without the need for calibration

Abstract

A reliable and simple procedure is proposed to measure the averaged absorption cross section (ACS) of a lossy object in a reverberation chamber (RC). This procedure is based on the time-domain measurement of the ACS in an RC. In the time-domain, to obtain the ACS, the chamber decay time needs to be known. Conventionally, the ACS is normally measured in the frequency domain, and a full two-port calibration must be carried out before collecting the S-parameters, which is tedious and time-consuming. In reality, the chamber decay time depends on the diffused loss of the RC, not the insertion loss of the cables. In this paper, by making use of this fact, the ACS can be measured accurately without calibration, which will simplify the measurement process and shorten the measurement time at the same time.