A mechanical mode-stirred reverberation chamber inspired by chaotic cavities

A multivariate approach to the calculation of field-field correlation matrices is used to estimate the number of uncorrelated positions in a mode-stirred reverberation chamber (RC) inspired by chaotic cavities. The growth of the number of independent stirrer configurations is found to increase more rapidly with frequency than in a conventional RC. This is ascribed to the regular geometry forming the baseline cavity (screened room) of an RC, responsible for localizing energy and preserving regular (bouncing ball) modes. Smooth wall deformations are introduced in order to create underlying wave dynamical instability and then destroy survived regular modes. Numerical full-wave simulations are performed for a reverberation chamber with corner hemispheres and wall spherical caps. Field sampling is performed by moving a mechanical “carousel” stirrer. It is found that a wave-chaotic RC has improved performances in terms of lowest usable frequencies and number of uncorrelated cavity realizations of mechanical stirrers.