Hybrid Analysis of Human Exposure from Base-Station Antennas in Underground Environment

In this study we have employed an effective technique for dosimetric analyses of base station antennas in an underground environment. The technique combines a ray-tracing method and the finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) method to calculate the specific absorption rate (SAR) in the human body. The ray-tracing method was applied to evaluate the incident fields in relation to the exposed subject in a three-dimensional space, while the FDTD method was used to calculate the detailed SAR distributions in the human body. A scenario under an underground passage with the installation of a top-loaded monopole antenna was analyzed to investigate the relationship between the actual antenna exposure and a plane-wave exposure. The results show that the plane-wave exposure overestimated the whole-body average SAR in most cases, although this was not always true for peak SAR. The finding implies not only the usefulness of the present uniform-exposure-based reference level for the whole-body average SAR evaluation but also the necessity of modeling actual underground environment for high-precision local peak SAR evaluation