Numerical study of currents induced on a partially shielded wire within an ideal reverberation test chamber

Abstract

An electromagnetic susceptibility test in a reverberation chamber has been simulated numerically. The electromagnetic environment of the chamber was simulated using a previously introduced method that samples the plane wave spectrum of the random fields at fixed incidence angles determined from spherical sampling theory. The sampling scheme gives excitation fields that have ideal statistics over the volume occupied by the equipment under test (EUT) while reducing the computation time over traditional approaches. A refinement of the technique has been introduced that exploits the reciprocity principle to further reduce the computational load when simulating electromagnetically large EUTs with a limited number of test points of interest. Up to 1000 000 samples of the random chamber fields were considered. The simulations show that the current coupled onto a wire that is partially shielded by a conducting box with a large aperture exhibits strong resonances. The resonant frequencies appear to be determined mainly by the box dimensions, with aperture resonances also contributing. Statistical testing shows that the induced wire currents follow an ideal Rayleigh distribution independent of the frequency of the excitation.