CWI

CWI – Continuous Wave Immersion Test

Analyzing the EMP susceptibility of large, extended systems is a delicate assignment. Several tools are often needed, including high level pulsed field tests, pulsed injection current testing, low level continuous wave immersion testing as well as numerical simulations. The main reason is that there are no possibilities to illuminate a very large object with a threat level EMP field. However, by means of continuous wave immersion test, CWI, the EMP susceptibility analysis can gain a lot of information.

The CWI method has two exceptional advantages. First, the test object is illuminated with a relatively homogeneous electromagnetic field over its entire volume, inducing proper currents in all cables and other metallic structures. Second, the response is extrapolated to threat level pulse by means of Fourier analysis. This is a very helpful process that really supports the understanding of how the test object responds to a real EMP.

Although the illumination is performed in frequency domain with one single frequency at the time, the response is presented in time domain where reflections and resonances as well as time domain norms like peak amplitude and time derivatives of the resulting currents and voltages can be analyzed. This is very helpful for the analysis. It differs a lot from other frequency domain methods, like for instance Shielding Effectiveness tests (SE) that are local investigations of the shield and not possible to extrapolate to EMP response.

Emicon offer complete CWI tests of small or extended systems, including test planning and post-test analysis.

We also offer complete CWI test systems, including all necessary equipment such as power amplifiers, antennas, fiber-optic links, network analyzers, CWI software and shielded measurement containers etc. Of course, we do all the integration and training.