10/01/2012
Experimental Evaluation of the SAR Induced in Head Phantoms of Three- and Eight-Year-Old Children
Marie-Christine Gosselin, Sven Kühn, Andreas Christ, Marcel Zefferer, Emilio Cherubini, Jurriaan F. Bakker, Gerard C. van Rhoon, and Niels Kuster, IEICE Transactions on Communications, Volume E95-B, Number 10, pp. 3215–3224, October 2012
The exposure of children to mobile phones has been a concern for years, but conclusions regarding compliance with safety standards are so far based only on simulations. Regulators have requested that these conclusions be supported by experimental evidence. The objectives of this study are 1) to test whether the hypothesis that the specific anthropomorphic mannequin (SAM) used in standardized compliance testing is conservative for homogeneous child heads and 2) to validate the numerical prediction of the peak spatial SAR (psSAR) in child heads. To achieve these objectives, head phantoms of 3- and 8-year-old children were developed and manufactured.
The scientific and technical impact of the study can be summarized as:
- confirmation that SAM is conservative for children
- demonstration that the currently recommended experimental SAR averaging procedure is conservative but that numerical SAR averaging procedures may significantly underestimate the actual psSAR
- confirmation that the currently defined limits in terms of averages of cubical shape masses are impractical for non-ambiguous evaluations, i.e., for achieving inter-laboratory repeatability.