Modeling of Anechoic Chamber Using a Beam-tracing Technique

Building an anechoic chamber involves a substantial investment both financially and in physical space. Hence, there is much interest in trying to reduce the required investment while still maintaining adequate performance. The performance of an anechoic chamber depends on the type, size, and array configuration of the absorber elements as well as the geometry of the screened room on which the inner surfaces are covered with RF absorbers. If the room geometry is designed such that an electromagnetic ray from the transmitter will only reach the receiver antenna after a few reflections, the wave energy may be sufficiently damped after a few bounces off the absorbing walls and ceiling. Hence, lower cost RF absorbers can be used to make the anechoic chamber design more economical. In this paper, a variant of beam-tracing technique is used for modeling of anechoic chamber to study the normalized site attenuation (NSA) performance of the anechoic chamber. This allows the chamber performance to be predicted prior to the actual construction. The major advantage of beam-tracing over ray tracing is the path loss information at multiple receiver locations can be determined simultaneously as opposed to running a ray tracing simulation for each receiver location one at a time. As a result, the computing time is greatly reduced. This feature is particularly useful in calculating the field strength at different heights of the receiving antenna in EMC site calibration procedure. The efficient modeling tool has given rise to the successful design and construction of an asymmetrical shape anechoic chamber that supports various measurement needs including EMC tests at the Multimedia University, Malaysia. 24 Chung, Tech, and Chuah