Randomizing Plane-Wave Incidence for Rayleigh Field Synthesis in Reverberation Chambers

Plane-wave (PW) superposition is employed to synthesize accurate electromagnetic field distributions featuring Rayleigh field statistics expected in well-stirred reverberations chambers (RCs). Several angular PW incidence distributions are compared in terms of the field spatial correlation properties. From this comparison it is shown that a spherical spiral sampling scheme provides flexibility to choose an arbitrary number of PW incidence directions while closely approaching the accuracy provided by quasi-optimal Maximum Determinant and Spherical Designs spherical sampling schemes. Finally, it is also shown that random rotations of the constellation of PW incidence direction sets yield much larger RC working volumes compared to a static constellation.