Analysys of on-body antenna radiation pattern using a numerical technique based on FDTD and equivalence principle

This paper presents a numerical technique based on finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) and equivalence principle, to evaluate the on-body antenna radiation pattern distortion. With the FDTD method is very easy to model stratified dielectric objects like the human body, but to model antenna and human body together, the high resolution needed to model the radiating element leads to a strong increase of computational memory required. In the proposed technique the equivalence principle is used to separate the original problems into two sub-problems: 1) the antenna is analysed using CST Microwave Studio in free space; 2) the human body is handled with FDTD procedure. The described technique has been used to evaluate the on-body radiation pattern distortion for two different planar antennas at 2.4 GHz.