shield-can design hint

[KC_O_o]

shield can design

Hi,

Instead of just a fully closed metal shield box, is there any more advance technique to further improve the isolation? should it be frequency dependent? target freq. range is 1G to 12G. Any app. notes or simulation background on that?

Thanks,
KC_

 

[flatulent]

shielding can design

You can coat the inside of the shield with absorbing material that is usually ferrite material with a high loss tangent with a rubbery binder.

 

[KC_O_o]

For desktop computer casing or microwave oven front shielding, holes are usually punched on the metal plate, would it affect something?

 

[IanP]

I was told the holes in the front door of a microwave oven were shaped round because the microwave beam is shaped as a square. Thus, this means that a square shape object cannot pass through a round shaped object. Is this a true statement or not? -- BH, Texas

No, there is no square-peg in round-hole effect going on in microwave ovens. Microwaves reflect from conducting surfaces, just as light waves reflect from shiny metals, and they can't pass through holes in conducting surfaces if those holes are substantially smaller than their wavelengths. The holes in the conducting mesh covering the microwave oven's window are simply too small for the microwaves and the microwaves are reflected by that mesh.

Microwaves themselves have no well-defined shape but they do have firm rules governing their overall structures. Books usually draw microwaves (and all other electromagnetic waves) as wavy lines, as though something was truly going up and down in space. From that misleading representation, it's easy for people to suppose that electromagnetic waves can't get through certain openings.

In reality, electromagnetic waves consist of electric and magnetic fields (influences that push on electric charge and magnetic pole, respectively) that point up and down in a rippling fashion, but nothing actually travels up and down per say. The spatial structures of these fields are governed by Maxwell's equations, a set of four famous relationships that bind electricity and magnetism into a single, unified classical theory. Maxwell's equations dictate the structures of electromagnetic waves and predict that electromagnetic waves on one side of a conducting surface can't propagate through to the other side of that surface. Even if there are small holes in the conducting surface, holes that are much smaller that the wavelength of the waves, those waves can't propagate through the surface. More specifically, the fields die off exponentially as they try to penetrate through the holes and the waves don't propagate on the far side.

The choice of round holes in the oven mesh is simply a practical one. You can pack round holes pretty tightly in a surface while leaving their conducting boundaries relatively robust. And round holes treat all electromagnetic waves equally because they have no wide or narrow directions.

On similar matter, have a look at these materials used in the GHz range shielding:
http://www.emf-meter.com/Shielding.htm

Regards,
IanP