Analysing the shielding effectiveness of rectangular enclosure by determining aperture dimensions with particle swarm optimization

Electromagnetic shielding enclosure is used to protect electronic circuits against external EMI. Aperture on the enclosure, which is necessary for various reasons such as mounting connector, ventilation attenuates shielding effectiveness (SE) of the enclosure. Enlarging enclosure dimensions makes SE get better. Yet, they canot be designed so large due to weight and dimension considerations for EV. When the dimensions of the shielding enclosure remain fixed and the aperture is to have a particular area, it is essential to optimize aperture dimensions to increase SE. In this paper, an optimization methodology based on PSO is designed to obtain the optimal SE for a particular dimension range. The study also provides a comparative analysis between designed optimization methodology and the one based on genetic algorithm in the literature. Obtained SE results indicate that the optimization methodology establishes a very good agreement with the results in the literature. Moreover, it has faster convergence and higher calculation accuracy than GA and it utilizes a smaller number of parameters thanks to its simplicity. Finally, it is concluded that through designed optimization methodology in this study, SE of the enclosure can be raised by optimizing aperture dimensions when the dimensions of shielding enclosure remain fixed.