Requirements for an effective reverberation chamber: unloaded or loaded

In this paper, we present two versions of a threshold metric for the purpose of accessing the effectiveness of a reverberation chamber. One metric is based on the chamber quality factor (Q), and the other is based on the volume of the loaded reverberation chamber. These metrics are baseline quantities that must be exceeded in order to have an effective reverberation chamber. These threshold metrics are obtained from two different approaches. The first approach is based on a free-space transmission formulation and the scalar mean power density associated with the "stirred energy" in the chamber and requires that the stirred energy exceeds the unstirred energy throughout most of the chamber volume. The second approach is obtained by requiring that the amplitude of the electric (or magnetic) field satisfies the expected Rayleigh probability density function throughout most of the chamber volume. We present an application of these metrics for the case of a reverberation chamber loaded with spheres composed of lossy materials.