Monte Carlo Simulation of Clothed Skin Exposure to Electromagnetic Field With Oblique Incidence Angles at 60 GHz

Abstract

This study presents an investigation of clothed human skin exposure to obliquely incident electromagnetic waves at 60 GHz. We clarified the combined impacts of the cloth material, incidence angle, and polarization on the assessment of transmittance and absorbed power density (APD) at the skin surface. A Monte Carlo simulation was conducted considering the thickness variation of the cloth material and skin tissue. For the case of transverse magnetic™ wave exposure, the transmittance increases with increasing incident angle up to the maximum transmittance angle in the range from 60 to 80°, which is known as the Brewster effects, regardless of textile materials and air gap between cloth and skin. The air gap results in a periodic fluctuation of the APD, where the variation is almost within 1 dB when the incident power density is constant and the incident angle is smaller than 40°. Our results also show that as the air gap increases to 2.5 mm, i.e., half-wavelength at 60 GHz in the air, the APD within the skin surface covered by typical cloth materials increases up to 40% compared with that of bare skin. Although the use of several cloth materials may increase the transmittance and APD in oblique incidence scenarios, all the results of the APD do not exceed the basic restriction for local exposure, demonstrating that the current guidelines for human exposure to electromagnetic fields are appropriate for preventing the excessive exposure at 60 GHz considering the impacts of oblique incidence angles and cloth materials.