Development of a Novel Method for Automotive On-board Transmitter EMC Immunity Testing

Sammanfattning: As the automotive industry advances through technology integration, components are designed to operate at increasingly higher frequencies. Consequently, there will be an increasing demand for automotive electromagnetic compatibility (EMC) testing. Testing and certification institutes, such as RISE Research Institutes of Sweden AB, thus face an urgent need to develop innovative solutions that can effectively address this growing demand. This master thesis work concerns one EMC test method in particular - the On-board Transmitter (OBT). This is a test which mainly serves to test the immunity of vehicles to electromagnetic disturbances originating from hand-held devices. The conventional test is performed in an anechoic chamber and the methodology requires a substantial amount of time. The intent with this work is thus to evaluate the potential of a novel OBT method where the concept of a reverberating chamber is applied inside the vehicle compartment. Initially, the conventional method was examined from two mock-ups of idealized cases, and it was observed that the electromagnetic field in the near-field region of the transmitter is highly erratic. It was also concluded that the test setup is particularly sensitive to the polarization of the transmitter. With these findings in mind, the accuracy of the conventional method was deemed questionable. Evaluation of the proposed Reverberating On-board Transmitter (ROBT) method proved that the electromagnetic environment inside the vehicle did not resemble a perfect reverberation chamber. Which was expected as the absorbing material such as seating and upholstery likely prevents a field distribution similar to that in a reverberation chamber. Still, the intent of the project was to find a test method superior to the conventional method and it can be stated that the ROBT method is an adequate option due to its capacity to expose the electronics to isotropic radiation. This was found from two measures which this thesis introduces: expected isotropicity eiso, a relative measure of the electric field components and DDoF, a quantification of the spatial distribution inside a reverberation chamber.