Multi-physics Analysis of Polystyrene based RF Absorbers

RF absorbers dissipate the incident electromagnetic fields into heat to the environment. Depending on the substrate of the absorber, different processes govern the heat transfer methodology like conduction, convection or radiation. In EMC applications, the absorbers can be subject to multiple applications with high incident fields. Hence, it is vital to investigate the thermal aspect of the absorbers experimentally or with multiphysics numerical tools. In this paper, polystyrene-based absorbers are inspected experimentally initially. The same test setup is modeled in Ansys HFSS and Ansys Icepak to simulate the EM and thermal behavior of the absorber. The simulation model is validated by comparing the simulation results to the experimental results. Based on the validation, further simulations are conducted to explore the temperature variations due to change in the measurement distances from the source to the absorber and the temperature variations over different frequencies. These simulations provide better insights into the temperature distribution inside the absorbers.