Setup for EMI Shielding Effectiveness Tests of Electrically Conductive Polymer Composites at Frequencies up to 3.0 GHz

Conductive polymer composites have been receiving increased interest both from the scientific community and industry with a special focus on electromagnetic interference (EMI) shielding applications. In this paper, we present the design, EM wave simulation, and validation through S-parameters measurements of an EMI shielding effectiveness (SE) tester based on the ASTM D4935 standard, to be used in the development of such materials. EM wave simulations and computer aided design were used in parallel to improve the SE test setup performance, which resulted in a unique low-loss coaxial-spherical-conical smooth transition design that ensured the best tradeoff between sample size and performance. The proposed SE tester has an insertion loss smaller than 1 dB, with good reproducibility and a setup-independent frequency response in the frequency range from a few kHz up to 3 GHz.