A non-conforming multi-element DGTD method for the simulation of human exposure to electromagnetic waves

International audienceThe great majority of numerical calculations of electric energy deposition in human tissues exposed to microwaves are performed using the finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) method and voxel-based geometrical models of the tissues. The straightforward implementation of the method and its computational efficiency are among the main reasons for FDTD being currently the leading method for numerical assessment of human exposure to electromagnetic waves. However, the rather difficult departure from the commonly used Cartesian grid and cell size limitations regarding the discretization of very detailed structures of human tissues are often recognized as the main weaknesses of the FDTD method in this application context. In particular, interfaces between tissues where sharp gradients of the electromagnetic field may occur are hardly modeled rigorously in these studies (this is generally referred as the staircasing effect). We present here an alternative numerical dosimetry methodology that is based on a DGTD method designed to work with non-conforming cubic-tetrahedral meshes for more flexibility in the discretization process of complex propagation scenes. For example, in the context of head tissues exposure to mobile phone radiation, the computation domain is divided in two regions: an unstructured tetrahedral mesh-based heterogeneous model of head tissues and an orthogonal cartesian mesh of the vacuum part of the propagation domain. We present numerical results comparing this approach with strategies based on fully Cartesian and fully tetrahedral meshes of the whole computational domain