Experimental Validation of a Plasma Model for Electromagnetic Metal Foam Shields

In this paper we investigate, on the basis of an "effective medium approach", the use of metal foams for electromagnetic shielding solutions. In more details, a shielding effectiveness analysis has been performed by modeling metal foams as a homogeneous medium that shows the dispersion profile of a plasma. The suggested approach is experimentally validated demonstrating that metal foams behave like a plasma medium whose plasma frequency is in the microwave range. The implementation of the proposed effective medium approach has been developed in a proprietary full-wave simulator. Results demonstrate that, by using the plasma model, general electromagnetic analysis of metal foams can be accurately performed with reasonable computational efforts.