Uncertainty evaluation in numerical modeling of complex devices

Numerical simulation is an efficient tool for exploring and understanding the physics of complex devices, e.g. mobile phones. For meaningful results, it is important to evaluate the uncertainty of the numerical simulation. Uncertainty quantification in specific absorption rate (SAR) calculation using a full computer-aided design (CAD) mobile phone model is a challenging task. Since a typical SAR numerical simulation is computationally expensive, the traditional Monte Carlo (MC) simulation method proves inadequate. The unscented transformation (UT) is an alternative and numerically efficient method herein investigated to evaluate the uncertainty in the SAR calculation using the realistic models of two commercially available mobile phones. The electromagnetic simulation process is modeled as a nonlinear mapping with the uncertainty in the inputs e.g. the relative permittivity values of the mobile phone material properties, inducing an uncertainty in the output, e.g. the peak spatial-average SAR value.The numerical simulation results demonstrate that UT may be a potential candidate for the uncertainty quantification in SAR calculations since only a few simulations are necessary to obtain results similar to those obtained after hundreds or thousands of MC simulations.