Research Article Scenarios Approach to the Electromagnetic Exposure: The Case Study of a Train Compartment

Copyright © 2015 A. Paffi et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Previous studies identified the train compartment as the place where people can experience the highest exposure levels (still below the international guideline limits) to electromagnetic fields in the radiofrequency range. Here a possible scenario of a train compartment has been reproduced and characterized, both numerically and experimentally. A good agreement between the simulated electric field distributions and measurements has been found. Results indicate that the higher values of exposure in specific positions inside the train compartment depend on the number of active cell phones, the bad coverage condition, the cell orientation, and the presence of metallic walls. This study shows that the proposed approach, based on the scenarios characterization, may efficiently support the assessment of the individual electromagnetic exposure. 1