The overview of measuring the shielding effectiveness of the materials in complex electromagnetic environment

The wide-spreading use of innovative lightweight materials like advanced composites and metal coated plastics in several fields of applications has pushed toward an increasing interest in the characterization of the shielding performances of test materials. In the paper, we revisit the conventional methods of measuring shielding effectiveness of materials, and introduce the nested reverberation chamber methods (two reverberation chambers). The deficiencies in the existing approaches were illustrated. We advised the new approach should account for aperture, cavity size, and chamber loading effects, for which some current reverberation chamber approaches do not correctly account. This work is useful in estimating the shielding ability of the materials in complex electromagnetic environment.