The effectiveness of non-ionizing radiation protective clothing: A computational study

Document Type : Research Article

Authors

1 msaviz@aut.ac.ir

2 Biomedical Engineering Department Amirkabir University of Technology (Tehran Polytechnic), Tehran, Iran

Abstract

Exposure protective clothing has been suggested especially for pregnant women as a protection against RF and microwave electromagnetic fields. These are usually made of metal-woven fabrics. In this article, we use computer simulation methods with a homogeneous human model and plane wave exposure at different polarizations and wave incidence angles over a wide range of frequencies, to inspect if a typical anti-exposure clothing model might fail to reduce the fields inside the body under certain exposure conditions and/or at some frequencies. Indeed, as far as our model and computational study can represent actual conditions, it is found that for waves incident along the body axis (as arises e.g. in the sleeping status) the clothing might not only fail to reduce the penetration of EM fields, but can rather increase the electric field intensity in certain body areas, including the abdominal parts which were intended to be protected during pregnancy. The increase can be as high as 30 dB as compared with the same scenario without radiation protective clothing, and is more pronounced for frequencies above 10 MHz. We conclude that more physics-aware designs should be employed for such clothing, and simple intuitive designs shall be checked prior to production and marketing.

Keywords

Main Subjects

AUT Journal of Electrical Engineering
Volume 55, Issue 1
March 2023
Pages 7-7

Files

Share

How to cite

Statistics