A comparison of EMI/EMC test procedures for road vehicles

A research programme has been carried out for TRRL to compare different methods of testing vehicle electronic anti-lock equipment for electromagnetic compatibility. Most effort was concentrated on the comparison between the stripline component test used to satisfy the requirements of ECE Regulations No 13 and whole vehicle susceptibility tests performed on a range of commercial vehicles. The test vehicles included rigid and articulated HGVs, a passenger coach and a saloon car. In addition to the main programme, other test techniques have been considered. The use of bulk current injection as an alternative component test and the use of bulk current absorption spectra as a method of identifying worst case conditions and as a transfer function between bulk current injection data and whole vehicle data have been investigated. Component tests have also been performed using a large Transverse Electromagnetic (TEM) cell instead of the stripline. The research programme has demonstrated that it is not possible to correlate, on a point by point basis, the results produced by different test methods. By concentrating on worst case conditions, however, it has been possible to derive useful scaling factors between the different methods of testing. Care must be taken in applying these scaling factors since they inevitably depend on the exact configuration used.