Development of Liquid-Type Human-Body Equivalent Antennas for Induced Ankle Current Measurements at VHF Band

This paper discusses the development of liquid-type human-body equivalent antennas using finite-difference time-domain analysis and measurements at the very high frequency band. The antennas are proposed as a human surrogate when measuring induced ankle currents. The developed antennas consist of acrylic rectangular blocks of different heights and widths and a metal plate connected together using metallic pins. The blocks in the antennas are filled with a NaCl solution. By using different combinations of the rectangular blocks, we can construct equivalent antennas for the realistic heterogeneous Japanese adult male, female, seven-, five-, and three-year-old models. The induced ankle currents in the equivalent antennas obtained when exposed to vertically polarized E-field were within 10% of their corresponding human models´ values for the frequency range between 30 and 100 MHz. In order to verify the performance of the proposed antennas and the numerical assumptions used in the analysis, we carried out experimental investigations when the equivalent antennas were exposed to electromagnetic fields from nearby monopole antennas.