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Radio Frequency Electromagnetic Fields in Large Conducting Enclosures: Effects of Apertures and Human Bodies on Propagation and Field-Statistics
Martin P. Robinson, Janet Clegg, and Andy C. Marvin, Member, IEEE
AbstractRadio frequency propagation in an electrically large resonant chamber (a screened room) was simulated by two models: a statistical combination of multiple resonant modes and a computational electromagnetic simulation [the transmission line matrix (TLM) method]. The purpose of this work was to investigate the effects of passengers and windows on electromagnetic elds (EMF) in aircraft and other vehicles. Comparison of the multimode models with measurements made in a screened room showed that as the electromagnetic losses increased, the transmission between two internal antennas was reduced, and there were fewer turning points in its frequency response. The autocorrelation of this frequency response provided a useful estimate of the composite Q-factor of the resonances and showed that the Q of the chamber was reduced from a value of the order of 10 000 when emptied to 1000 when windows were added and when lled with people to 100. The TLM simulation provided further useful information about the statistical variation of electric eld strength with position. Index TermsAircraft, cavity resonators, electromagnetic compatibility, electromagnetic elds, propagation, Q-factor, statistics, transmission line matrix methods, vehicles.

I. INTRODUCTION HEN considering the propagation of electromagnetic elds (EMF) in large conducting enclosures, it is only feasible to apply analytical methods so long as the number of resonant modes does not become too great. For a highly overmoded enclosure, it is necessary to adopt a statistical approach to propagation and shielding problems [1], and any statistical model will need to take into account the various mechanisms for electromagnetic loss that will affect the cavity resonances of the enclosure. In this paper, we consider enclosures that are large enough to hold one or more people, and we describe two methods of investigating the internal propagation at radio frequencies: a statistical combination of Lorentzian resonances that reproduces important features of the frequency response and a computational electromagnetic model that gives the statistical variation of eld strength with position. A motivation for this research was to study propagation in aircraft, trains, and other forms of transport. It has been suggested that when sources of radio frequency emissions, such as mobile phones, are used in aircraft cabins or on trains, the metallic enclosure acts as a resonant cavity, leading to hot spots where the EMF are enhanced. This could increase the severity of electromagnetic compatibility (EMC) problems from such devices.

However, in reality, the Q-factors of resonances will be reduced by the windows, which allow electromagnetic energy to escape, and by the presence of the passengers, whose bodies will absorb some of the energy. An understanding of these effects will aid the investigation of potential interference from mobile communication devices [2] and also of human exposure to EMF. Statistical methods have been used before by Panaretos et al. [3], who used a mechanical 1:20 scale model of a Boeing 757 fuselage and measured its shielding effectiveness from 400 MHz to 13 GHz (corresponding to 20650 MHz in a real aircraft). Their model showed the usefulness of statistical analysis of a frequency response, but did not include the effects of the passengers. It is therefore appropriate to investigate the damping effect of human bodies and apertures on the internal elds generated in an enclosure by a small source. Human bodies are known to reduce the Q-factors of resonances in aircraft [4]. We wished to quantify this behavior, and its effect on the statistical variation of the electric eld strength E. To do this, we utilized a screened room, which is a suitable model for a preliminary study because it has a similar cross section to a small commercial airliner and can be loaded with the same density of people per unit volume as a real aircraft. It can be easily tted with antennas, and being rectangular is convenient for computational electromagnetic modeling (although nonrectangular enclosures can also be studied by such techniques if a stepped approximation to the surfaces is used). In this study, we disregarded the possible electromagnetic losses in wiring looms, seats, fabrics, and thermal insulation, and considered just the contributions from bodies and windows. We applied our two models to experimental measurements made over the frequency range 900920 MHz, which is of interest because it is used for GSM mobile (cellular) phones in many countries and is also a frequency range at which aircraft cabins and train carriages are electrically large.

II. THEORETICAL BACKGROUND The presence of a human body in a large resonant cavity is known to perturb its resonances, lowering both the resonant frequencies and their Q-factors [5], [6]. At 59 MHz, the presence of a single person in a screened room (details given below) reduces the Q from 8000 to between 5 and 700, depending on the orientation of the body with respect to the E-eld. This is due mainly to the bodys water content, because water has a much higher permittivity than other constituents of the body. For the lower order modes, it is possible to use resonant perturbation

Manuscript received August 5, 2005; revised November 25, 2005. The authors are with Physical Layer Group, Department of Electronics, University of York, Heslington, York YO10 5DD, U.K. Digital Object Identier 10.1109/TEMC.2006.873856

0018-9375/$20.00 2006 IEEE

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theory to predict the shifts in frequency and Q of a cavity [7], [8], but for an electrically large cavity with many modes, a statistical approach is likely to be more appropriate. Hill et al. describe a power-balance theory, which gives the total Q by combining individual contributions in parallel [9] Q1 = Q1 + Q1 + Q1 + Q1 . 1 2 3 4 (1)

Here, Q1 represents losses in the cavity walls, Q2 the absorption by lossy dielectrics and other materials, Q3 the effects of apertures and windows, and Q4 the losses in the measuring antennas. For a typical aircraft at 910 MHz, the formulas given by Hill et al. predict Q1 and Q4 to be of the order of 105 , and the total Q should therefore be dominated by the Q2 and Q3 terms. The aperture Q-factor Q3 is given by Q3 = 4V < l > (2)

where V is cavity volume, is the free-space wavelength, and < l > is the average transmission cross section. For electrically large circular apertures, < l > is equal to half the total area of the windows. For a small airliner with cross-sectional area 5 m2 and windows of area 0.1 m2 spaced 0.5 m apart, Q3 should be about 2000. In a train carriage, the windows are much larger and Q3 should be of the order of 100. The absorption Q-factor Q2 is given by Q2 = 2V < a > (3)

where < a > is the average absorption cross section. We assume that the passengers are located far enough apart that their individual contributions can be combined in parallel. The absorption cross section of the human body depends on posture and orientation as well as frequency but is typically of the order of 0.5 m2 . For the small airliner with cross-sectional area 5 m2 and passengers seated three abreast at a pitch of 0.8 m, Q2 should be about 80 if all the seats are lled. Holloway et al. [10] investigated the Q-factor of a 40-m3 reverberation chamber at 900 and 1900 MHz, and found that loading the chamber with 250 bottles of lossy liquid, with a total volume Vliq of 0.125 m3 , reduced the Q from 2300 to 120. From the data presented, it can be shown that Q1 varies linearly with Vliq , with a gradient dQ 1 /dVliq = 0.016 m3 . III. MEASUREMENTS IN SCREENED ROOM The screened room is a rectangular EMC test chamber, with width a = 3.00 m, height b = 2.37 m, length d = 4.70 m, volume abd = 33.4 m3 , and cross-sectional area ab = 7.11 m2 . There is a single door tted with nger-strip gaskets. To measure the propagation between two points in the room, monopole antennas (length 70 mm) were attached directly to bulkhead connectors in the ceiling, at 0.90 and 1.15 m from the ends of the room. The theory of Hill et al. [9] predicts that the contribution to the Q-factor from these antennas Q4 is at least 73 000, so they are unlikely to perturb the cavity resonances signicantly. An automated network analyzer (ANA) measured S21 (transmission coefcient) between the monopoles at 1601 frequencies from 900 to 920 MHz, which is a frequency spacing of 12.5 kHz.

The coupling between the monopoles was rst measured for the empty room. Windows were then represented by blocks of radio-absorbing material (RAM), a multilayer carbon-loaded foam. Three square blocks of RAM of size 0.6 0.6 m were mounted along one wall, to give a window area per length of enclosure similar to that of a typical airliner. We were not able to create real apertures without permanently damaging the screened room. However, the absorbing material, Eccosorb AN79 [11], is well characterized and has a reectivity of less than 20 dB at 900920 MHz. Finally, the frequency response was measured with between one and nine passengers in the room, either standing or sitting on chairs (constructed of steel, plastic, and fabric) as in Fig. 1. Three of the measured frequency responses are shown in Fig. 2. Note that as the losses are increased by the presence of the windows (RAM) and the passengers, the overall coupling gets lower, and there are fewer turning points in the frequency response. RAM placed on the oor had a similar effect to that on the walls. In further experiments, a mobile phone was simulated by a balanced 150-mm-long dipole antenna, which was driven by a cable connected via a bulkhead connector in the wall of the room. The coupling between this antenna and a ceiling monopole was measured in the otherwise empty room and for various dipole positions with nine passengers present: in a passengers trouser pocket, in his breast pocket, and held away from his body. The results are shown in Fig. 3. Again, the presence of windows and passengers leads to a smoother and generally lower frequency response than for the empty room. IV. STATISTICAL ANALYSIS OF MODES The lowest resonant frequency of the screened room is 59 MHz [5], and at 900920 MHz, it is an electrically large cavity. Its behavior at such frequencies can therefore be understood as arising from the simultaneous excitation of many resonant modes [12], [13]. Let us assume that each resonant mode has Lorentzian line shape E(f ) Q 1 + jQ f fi fi f
1

(4)

where E(f ) is electric eld strength, and fi is the resonant frequency of the mode. We can calculate all the resonant frequencies within a given range from the Helmholtz equation fm n p = c0 2 m2 n2 p2 + 2 + 2 2 a b d (5)

where m, n, and p are integers and c0 is the speed of light. Evaluating this equation shows that there are 283 TEm n p modes between 900 and 920 MHz. For our statistical model of the room, we decided not to include exact details of the coupling to the modes. To calculate the frequency response, we instead combined modes with coupling coefcients ki randomly chosen between 0 and 1, and random phase differences i between 0 and 2 , giving the equation

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Fig. 1.

Nine passengers seated in the screened room (photograph by D. A. Stone).

Fig. 2. Measured frequency response of empty screened room (solid line), room with windows only (dotted line), and room with windows and nine seated passengers (dashed line).
1

Fig. 3. Coupling between monopole and mobile phone (dipole) in empty room (solid line) and in room with windows populated with nine people: phone in trouser pocket (dotted line), in breast pocket (dashed line), and held away from body (dash-dot line).

E(f ) = k0
i

ki Q 1 + jQ

f fi fi f

exp(ji )

(6)

where k0 is chosen empirically to give the best t to the measured data. The fi should be summed over all the fm n p modes, but in practice, they need only be those modes with resonant frequencies near to f . The statistical combination was evaluated for modes with resonant frequencies in the range 880940 MHz, and this was done for Q-factors of 20 000 down to 100. Each frequency response was calculated at the same 1601 frequencies as for the measurements described in Section II. The frequency responses for Q-factors of 10 000, 1000, and 100 are shown in Fig. 4. Note that as the losses increase, the

forms of these plots follow those of the measured results in two ways: There are fewer turning points and a lower overall S21 . The model does not predict exact features and would not be expected to give its probabilistic nature. The autocorrelation function [14] (which is more often employed for time-domain signals) can be used to examine the roughness of the frequency response plots, which depends on the Q-factors of the resonances. The equation for autocorrelation of the frequency response is

A(f ) =
f =0

E(f )E(f f ) df

(7)

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Fig. 4. Frequency responses calculated from statistical combination of resonant modes, for Q-factors of 10 000 (solid line), 1000 (dotted line), and 100 (dashed line).

Fig. 6. Variation of reciprocal of Q with number of passengers. Circles: passengers sitting (monopole to monopole); squares: passengers standing (monopole to monopole); stars: passengers sitting (monopole to dipole at three different positions).

Fig. 5. Autocorrelations of frequency responses: Dotted lines show measurements, and solid lines show results of the statistical model with Q-factors of 200, 500, 1000, 2000, 5000, 10 000, and 20 000.

in seams, joints, etc.) The composite Q is reduced to 700 for the room with windows only and to 300 for the room containing nine seated people. Similar plots (not shown) give Q of 180 for the room with nine people standing, and Q for the dipole-to-monopole coupling (modeling propagation from a mobile phone) reduced from 11 000 for the empty room to 2000 for the windows only and 200400 for the populated room, depending on the position of the dipole (mobile). In Fig. 6, the reciprocal of the Q-factor is plotted against the number of people in the room, showing increasing loss with density of passengers. If we assume that each passenger has a mass of 70 kg and a water content of 60%, then the gradient with respect to the total volume of water dQ1 /dVliq = 0.009 m3 , which is not far from the value of 0.016 m3 for the measurements of Holloway et al. [10] on bottles of lossy liquids. V. NUMERICAL MODELING

For a single Lorentzian mode as described by (6), it can be shown that A(f ) has a peak whose width is inversely proportional to Q. The multimode case is more complicated, but the shape of the peak in A(f ) is likely to still be a useful indicator of the losses. The autocorrelation functions of the frequency responses were approximated by discrete sums using the Matlab [15] function xcorr on the magnitude of E. We did this for the measured data and for Q-factors ranging from 100 to 20 000 in the statistical model. Fig. 5 shows the peaks of the autocorrelations. By comparing the shapes of the plots, we estimate the composite Q to be about 13 000 for the empty room, which compares well with the value of 14 000 obtained by measuring S21 with a ne frequency resolution and using a curve-tting algorithm to obtain Q for well-dened peaks [16] (this value is lower than the Q1 suggested by the theory of Hill et al. [9] because of losses

The transmission line matrix (TLM) method was used to model the propagation in the screened room [5], with a 30-mm grid to satisfy the /10 requirement at 900920 MHz. One node of the grid was chosen as the excitation point and another to observe the time-domain response: these correspond to the positions of the monopole antennas. The model was run with 1598 880 time steps so that the Fourier transform of the response would give the same frequency step as in the measurements and the statistical model (12.5 kHz). The reection coefcient of the walls of the empty room was 0.9990. This was chosen by using iterative approximations to give an average empty Q-factor of 14 000, corresponding to earlier measurements, obtained from points in the vicinity of well-dened peaks in the frequency response [16]. To simulate the windows, we used square boundaries on the wall

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Fig. 7. TLM model of screened room showing windows, passengers, and excitation and observation points. Scales on axes show number of grid points on 30-mm grid.

corresponding to the positions of the blocks of RAM, with a reection coefcient of zero. To simulate the passengers, we could not use dielectric blocks because the high permittivity of tissues would reduce the wavelength and violate the /10 requirement. Instead, we simulated the surface of the body as a reective boundary with zero transmission coefcient. We calculated the dielectric properties of tissues using the parametric equations of Gabriel et al. [17]. Dry skin at 910 MHz has a complex permittivity of 41.417.2 j from which the plane-wave reection coefcient is found to be 0.743 + 0.045j. A value of 0.74 was used in the model, with three rectangular blocks of total volume 0.064 m3 with these boundaries simulating each seated passenger. The transmission coefcient was ignored because the attenuation through the body is over 20 dB. Underlying tissues may have some effect (the real part of the reection coefcient is 0.77 for muscle and 0.41 to 0.55 for fat), but this was not considered in our initial model. Fig. 7 shows the complete model. The model gives all three components of the electric and magnetic elds, but the following results refer to the vertical component of the E-eld, as this is what the monopole antennas measure. Graphs of frequency responses obtained by TLM are shown in Fig. 8. Comparison of autocorrelations of these frequency responses as in Section IV above gives a composite Q of 16000 for the empty room, 9000 for the room with windows only, and 700 for the room with windows and nine passengers. These values are rather higher than the measurements, but the qualitative changes in the shape of the frequency response are modeled well. The TLM model was also used to look at the statistical distribution of values of E at a xed frequency. At 910 MHz, 500 observation points were randomly selected for the empty room model, and 1000 points (none within a body) for the

Fig. 8. Frequency response obtained from TLM model, for empty screened room (solid line), room with windows only (dotted line), and room with windows and nine seated passengers (dashed line).

room with nine seated passengers. For an electrically large cavity with many simultaneously excited modes, the probability density function of the magnitude of the vertical component of E is expected to follow the Rayleigh distribution p(E) = E exp s2 E 2 2s2 (8)

with the mean value of E given by s /2. Fig. 9(a) shows the distribution of E for the empty room. The mean value of E was 0.0084 V/m with unit excitation. A Rayleigh distribution has been drawn in Fig. 9(a), which has the same mean value. Fig. 9(b) shows the corresponding results for

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Fig. 9. Statistical distribution of E-eld values for a TLM simulation of the screened room, and a Rayleigh distribution with the same mean E-eld. (a) Empty room; (b) room containing windows and nine passengers.

took approximately 6 s to produce in Matlab on a Pentium 4, 1.8-GHz processor. The limitation of the model depends on the computing power available, although if the electrical size of the enclosure is increased, the time taken to calculate and sort the resonant frequencies rises more rapidly than that to combine them according to (6). Once the frequency response has been calculated, the autocorrelation function is very useful in giving a composite value of the Q-factor. The TLM model is slower to run (typically several hours) but has the advantage of giving the spatial variation of elds at xed frequency as well as the frequency response. The simulation of a person by partially reecting surfaces works well. As is seen in the measurements, the presence of people in the room reduces the mean E-eld strength, the factor being equal to the square root of the ratio of Q-factors for the populated and empty room. Measurements on a screened room with similar population density to an aircraft have given useful information about the effects on the internal EMF. The measurements and simulations show that the Q of the room is of the order of 104 when empty, 103 with windows, and 102 with passengers. The theory of Hill et al. [9] described in Section II predicts that the measurements should give Q3 = 2400 and Q2 = 140, which are of the right order of magnitude. Measurements of the transmission coefcient between two antennas in an otherwise empty 16-seater minibusa passenger vehicle with large windowsindicated a Q-factor of the order of 100. However, an airliner would have much smaller windows, and so, its Q-factor should tend to be dominated by the passengers. One practical implication of this work is that the presence of windows and passengers will affect the propagation of electromagnetic radiation in aircraft and trains, reducing the probability of hot spots and electromagnetic interference. We did not consider the effects of wiring looms, fabrics, luggage, and so on, but these are likely to reduce the Q-factors of resonances still further. Any realistic model of electromagnetic propagation or shielding in aircraft must take these loss mechanisms into account. REFERENCES

the room containing nine seated passengers. Note the change of scale on the horizontal axis. It can be seen that the distribution is still approximately Rayleigh but is skewed slightly toward the lower values. With people in the room, the mean E-eld is reduced to 0.0019 V/m. Note that the reduction is 0.0019/0.0084 = 0.225, which is close to the square root of the ratio of the respective Q-factors: (700/16 000) = 0.209. VI. DISCUSSION There is good qualitative agreement between the multimode statistical model and the measurements. The model shows the same type of features in the frequency-response graphs, although not a detailed prediction of maxima and minima, as expected from its probabilistic nature. The statistical model runs quickly on a modern computerthe data sets plotted in Fig. 4 required the evaluation of 7500 modes, and each

[1] J. F. Dawson, M. P. Robinson, and T. Konefal, Computational electromagnetic (CEM) model validation against measured and calculated results, IEE Seminar on Validation of Computational Electromagnetics, pp. 1721, Mar. 30, 2004, ISBN 086341 396X. [2] G. Kuriger, H. Grant, A. Cartwright, and D. Heirman, Investigation of spurious emissions from cellular phones and the possible effect on aircraft navigation equipment, IEEE Trans. Electromagn. Compat., vol. 45, no. 2, pp. 281292, May 2003. [3] A. H. Panaretos, C. A. Balanis, and C. R. Birtcher, Shielding effectiveness and statistical analysis of cylindrical scale fuselage model, IEEE Trans. Electromagn. Compat., vol. 47, no. 2, pp. 361366, May 2005. [4] D. A. Hill, M. L. Crawford, R. T. Johnk, A. R. Ondrejka, and D. G. Camell, Measurements of shielding effectiveness and cavity characteristics of airplanes, Nat. Inst. Standards Technol., Boulder, CO, Rep. NISTIR 5023, 1994. [5] M. P. Robinson, J. Clegg, and D. A. Stone, A novel method of studying total body water content using a resonant cavity: Experiments and numerical simulation, Phys. Med. Biol., vol. 48, pp. 113125, 2003. [6] D. A. Stone and M. P. Robinson, Total body water measurements using resonant cavity perturbation techniques, Phys. Med. Biol., vol. 49, pp. 17731788, 2004. [7] R. F. Harrington, Time-Harmonic Electromagnetic Fields. New York: Wiley, 1961, pp. 317326.

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[8] A. W. Kraszewski, S. O. Nelson, and T.-S. You, Use of a microwave cavity for sensing dielectric properties of arbitrarily shaped biological objects, IEEE Trans. Microw. Theory Tech., vol. 38, no. 7, pp. 858863, Jul. 1990. [9] D. A. Hill, M. T. Ma, A. R. Ondrejka, B. F. Riddle, M. L. Crawford, and R. T. Johnk, Aperture excitation of electrically large, lossy cavities, IEEE Trans. Electromag. Compat., vol. 36, no. 3, pp. 169178, Aug. 1994. [10] C. L. Holloway, D. A. Hill, J. M. Ladbury, and G. Koepke, Requirements for an effective reverberation chamber: Unloaded or loaded, IEEE Trans. Electromag. Compat., vol. 48, no. 1, Feb. 2006, pp. 187194. [11] Emerson and Cuming Microwave Products Eccosorb AN Flexible Foam Sheet Broadband Microwave Absorbers, Data Sheet A6. [Online]. Available: http://www.eccosorb.com/catalog/eccosorb/an.pdf, 2003. [12] R. H. Price, H. T. Davis, and E. P. Wenaas, Determination of the statistical distribution of electromagnetic-eld amplitudes in complex cavities, Phys. Rev. E, vol. 48, no. 6, pp. 47164728, 1993. [13] G. J. Freyer, M. O. Hateld, and M. B. Slocum, Characterization of the electromagnetic environment in aircraft cavities excited by internal and external sources, in Proc. 15th AIAA/IEEE Digital Avionics Systems Conf., Atlanta, GA, USA, Oct. 27th31st, 1996, pp. 327332. [14] B. P. Lathi, Signal Processing and Linear Systems. Carmichael, CA: Berkeley-Cambridge Press, 1988, p. 182. [15] The MathWorks Inc. Matlab version 6.5, Natick, MA, 2002. [16] M. P. Robinson and J. Clegg, Improved determination of Q-factor and resonant frequency by a quadratic curve-tting method, IEEE Trans. Elecromagn. Compat., vol. 47, no. 2, pp. 399402, May 2005. [17] S. Gabriel, R. W. Lau, and C. Gabriel, The dielectric properties of biological tissues: III. Parametric models for the dielectric spectrum of tissues, Phys. Med. Biol., vol. 41, pp. 22712293, 1996.

He was with the National Physical Laboratory for 2 years and with the Bristol Oncology Centre for 3 years. In 1993, he joined the University of York, York, U.K., where he is currently a Lecturer in electronics. His research interests include design for EMC, electromagnetic measurements, and the interaction of electromagnetic radiation with biological tissues.

Janet Clegg received the B.Sc. and D.Phil. degrees from the University of York, York, U.K., in 1988 and 1992, respectively. She currently is a Research Fellow with the Physical Layers Group, Department of Electronics, University of York. Her research interests include computational electromagnetics; application of evolutionary computation optimization methods; electromagnetic measurement environments, screened rooms, and mode-stirred chambers; and optimization methods for trafc modeling.

Martin P. Robinson received the B.A. and M.A. degrees from the University of Cambridge, Cambridge, U.K., in 1986 and 1990, respectively, the M.Sc. degree in medical physics from the University of Aberdeen, Aberdeen, U.K., in 1990, and the Ph.D. degree in dielectric imaging from the University of Bristol, Bristol, U.K., in 1994.

Andy C. Marvin (M85) received the B.Eng., M.Eng., and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Shefeld, Shefeld, U.K., between 1972 and 1978. He is a Professor of applied electromagnetics, Leader of the Physical Layer Research Group, University of York, York, U.K., and the Technical Director of York EMC Services Ltd., University of York. His main research interests are EMC measurement techniques and shielding. Dr. Marvin is a Member of the Institution of Electrical Engineers, U.K., and is on the Executive Committee of the IEE Professional Network for EMC. He is the Chairman of COST Action 286 (EMC in diffused communications systems) and represents the U.K. on URSI Commission A (electromagnetic metrology). He is the Co-Convenor of the joint CISPR/IEC task force on the use of TEM cells for EMC measurements and a member of the IEEE Std-299 Working Group. He is also an Associate Editor of the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ELECTROMAGNETIC COMPATIBILITY.