The Effect of Zigzag Boundaries on the Reverberation Chamber Performance

Kai Chen,Chun Ren,Qian Xu,Xueqi Shen

doi:10.1109/access.2021.3123352

Kai Chen, Chun Ren + Show 2 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1109/access.2021.3123352

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Abstract

The stirrer design is important in a reverberation chamber measurement system. Previous study shows that the rotating radius of the stirrer plays a key role for the stirrer performance. However, to identify the contribution from the structure, optimizing the stirrer structure while keeping the stirring volume unchanged is necessary. In this paper, when the stirring volume is kept invariant, we show that the detailed structure of stirrers can be optimized to improve the performance but the effect is not significant. A comparative study is given to confirm the effect of zigzag boundaries on the stirrers. Both simulations and measurements confirm the performance improvement, key performance indicators such as field uniformity and correlated angles are simulated and measured.

Highlights

Reverberation chamber (RC) system has attracted many research attentions in the area of electromagnetic compatibility (EMC) [1] and over-the-air (OTA) testing [2] in recent years. Typical measurements such as radiated susceptibility [1], total radiated power [3] shielding effectiveness [1], antenna efficiency [4]-[6], total isotropic sensitivity [7], [8], throughput [9], [10], diversity gain [11][13] and channel capacity [11]-[13] can be measured in an RC system
The dimensions of an RC play a key role for the RC performance, because the RC works in the overmoded region, when the electrical dimensions of a cavity are not large enough, it may not be possible to support enough modes at low frequencies
The results show that the zigzag boundaries can improve the RC performance

Summary

INTRODUCTION

Reverberation chamber (RC) system has attracted many research attentions in the area of electromagnetic compatibility (EMC) [1] and over-the-air (OTA) testing [2] in recent years. The performance of an RC typically depends on two aspects: the dimensions of the cavity and design of stirrers (including the stirring mechanism [14]). Once the dimensions of a cavity are given, the design of stirrers becomes the key problem. It is believed that by increasing the current length at the edge of the stirrers, the stirrers can interact with waves at lower frequencies more effectively [29]-[32] This methodology has been widely used in antenna designs to reduce the physical size or lowering the working frequency of antennas. For two different stirrers with the same stirring volume, how the detailed structures affect the stirring performance need to be confirmed. We present a comparative study on the stirrer shape effect while keeping the stirring volume unchanged.

RC DESIGN AND SIMULATION RESULTS

FURTHER INVESTIGATIONS

CONCLUSION