ARL Electric-field Cage Modeling, Design and Calibration

A new electric-field cage is described, capable of generating uniform DC or quasi-static AC electric fields for sensor calibration and testing. This unique facility is a large parallel-plate capacitor with guard rings to control fringing fields. The cage dimensions and endplate voltages can be adjusted to meet the needs of a variety of experiments. The current size is 2.4 m high by 3.0 m wide (endplates) by 4.2 m long (in the field direction). Arbitrary AC waveforms (up to plusmn750 V p-p between 10 Hz and 1 kHz) or DC voltages (up to plusmn60 kV) can be generated in the lab with plate separations between 0.6 m and 4.2 m to generate fields up to 2.5 kV/m (AC) or 200 kV/m (DC). Techniques to minimize corona discharge at the highest voltage levels were used in the construction of the cage. Currently, the accuracy of the E-field in the cage is on the order of 1%, and the directionality of the field is better than 0.5deg over volumes greater than 1 m³ for all anticipated test scenarios. This meets or exceeds the specifications of world-class standards for E-field calibration facilities, and does so in a volume that is 15-500x larger than the facilities described in these standards