Use of ground planes within the spatial images technique: Application to the analysis of rectangular multilayered shielded enclosures

The use of ground planes is proposed inside the spatial images technique in order to calculate the multilayered shielded Green´s functions for rectangular enclosures. The positions of the ground planes are dynamically located, covering two walls of the cavity, as a function of the source position. Spatial mirror images, related to the ground planes, are used to perfectly impose the boundary conditions along these cavity walls. This completely removes the problems associated to the singular behaviour of the source when it is placed close to a wall or a corner, improving numerical stability. In addition, the method leads to a very efficient computation (about 15 times faster than the original approach), due to the reduced number of non-mirror images that must be effectively computed. A multi-band filter in hybrid waveguide-microstrip technology is analyzed with the new method, showing excellent agreement with measured data.