Comparison of computational electromagnetic codes applied to a sphere canonical problem

To maintain and improve international safety standards applicable to the use of cellular radio telephones, reliable calculations of electromagnetic field intensities in the human head, brain, and neck are required. The human head/cellular telephone problem requires the calculation of the electromagnetic field components within a lossy dielectric structure, with size of the order of a wavelength of the incident radiation. Simulations are made of lossy dielectric homogeneous and inhomogeneous spheres illuminated by plane-wave or by 0.4λ-dipole radiation at 900 MHz. The electric and magnetic field components and specific absorption rate values for each case are determined using several computational electromagnetic codes and the different results compared and illustrated. Local differences in specific absorption rate values between the methods exist, but values averaged over 1 or 10 g are within 10% of each other. A knowledge of the spread in results from different methods is needed for biomedical applications of the numerical codes to more complex problems in mobile communication