Shielding effectiveness measurements of materials using nested reverberation chambers

The use of reverberation chambers for determining the shielding effectiveness has the advantage over other techniques in that the reverberation chamber exposes the material to a more realistic environment. That is, in a reverberation chamber, the fields are incident on the material with various polarizations and angles of incidence. There are various reverberation chamber techniques found in the literature and international standards. These techniques can give incorrect results because aperture and cavity-size effects are not correctly accounted for. In fact, we show that for no sample in the aperture, these techniques give a nonzero result for shielding effectiveness. In this paper, we review existing techniques and present a new technique for determining the shielding effectiveness of materials from nested reverberation-chamber measurements. The new approach accounts for aperture, cavity size, and chamber loading effects. Various examples are presented to illustrate the utility of the new approach, and a discussion on edge treatments of the materials is given.