Book Review

The Design of Shielded Enclosures

By Louis T. Gnecco

As the title suggests, this book focuses on the aspects of designing, building, and testing shielded enclosures. It is written for those who have little or no knowledge in shielding principles, but who are faced with the task of coming up with an acceptable shielded enclosure—those who want a cookbook on how to do it, rather than a lot of theory. It is written at a level understandable to engineers and technicians—and even metalworkers—but the content is primarily focused on the mechanical side, as you would expect with shielding issues. Basic algebra is the only math used, and you can skip that too if you are just looking for the basic concepts.

The book is more like a reference than a textbook, so you can read only the paragraphs you need. It shows how to select a shielding material (including some useful nomograms for quantitative results), selecting and mounting gasketing (including useful tables on materials compatibility), controlling openings and wire penetrations (including tables on allowed openings), and testing the results. It also contains lots of lore on problems that might be encountered by the installer, but are never covered by the theorists (e.g., fire prevention).

Although the book touches on enclosures of all sizes, it is heavily slanted toward shielded facilities and shielded rooms, with much less on cabinet-sized enclosures and only a couple of paragraphs on small enclosures. Cable shielding and terminations are addressed, but lightly. Someone building a large enclosure should pretty much be able to do the job following the guidelines provided, but a neophyte designing a handheld plastic enclosure will be left a little short.

The design and test sections are basically two separate books—one on shielding and one on testing—glued together in a single binding. The testing section primarily addresses shielded facilities. Although this section contains lots of lore and tidbits useful to anyone getting into testing, it won't be much help to someone new to shielding.

The book includes some appendices, including a copy of MIL-STD-281 (a standard for measuring shielding effectiveness) and a comprehensive list of useful Web sites devoted to electromagnetic interference. It also includes a U.S. Food and Drug Administration report on magnetic fields in magnetic resonance imaging (useful to a select few).

The book is quite readable and is fairly well organized; you can find topics of interest easily in either the table of contents or the index. It is rather slim at only 200 pages, including 50 pages for the appendices and another 35 pages for testing, a subject that isn't even hinted at in the book's title. Still, it does cover the basics of shielding adequately, without burdening the reader with lots of theory.

Published by Butterworth-Heinemann (Woburn, MA); Price: $44.95; ISBN: 0750672706.

—William D. Kimmel

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