Reliable Finite-Difference Time-Domain Simulations of Reverberation Chambers by Using Equivalent Volumetric Losses

Abstract

A numerical code based on the finite-difference time-domain technique is adopted to simulate a large reverberation chamber including the stirrers and the actual antenna presence in the frequency range 200–1000 MHz. The power of the code lies in the parallelization that allows the execution on high-performance computers. Chamber losses are accounted for by introducing virtual volumetric losses in the hypothesis of ideal conductor walls. The correction that arises from this choice which allows us to speed up the numerical computation is verified by a comparison with the case of wall losses implemented by assuming a finite conductivity. The analysis of the statistics of the chamber field, stirrer uncorrelated positions, Rician K-factor, backscatter, and field uniformity returns overlapping results for the two techniques. The analysis of the spatial field correlation within a spatial grid shows a correlation greater than 0.5 in the whole frequency range and for all stirrer angles, so confirming the equivalence of the two methods to manage losses.