Section 6.1 · Further exercises · 6 of 17
Exercise 6.1.6: What is the wall made of?
About the further exercises of Section 6.1
Seventeen further exercises in the spirit of the problems, the home exercises and the worked examples, graded from easy to harder within each group. Exercises 6.1.1–6.1.4 are about uniform plane waves, , , and the triad, Exercises 6.1.5–6.1.6 about power, energy and loss, Exercises 6.1.7–6.1.10 about polarisation, Exercises 6.1.11–6.1.12 about the Doppler effect, and Exercises 6.1.13–6.1.17 mix power, exposure and polarisation. Besides the relations listed at the head of this subsection they use the lossy forms , , and (Exercise 6.1.6 only), the average energy density , Faraday's law , and the polarisation match . A field factor is .
What is the wall made of?
#A uniform plane wave travels normally through a thick concrete wall (). Probe measurements inside the wall give the phase constant and the attenuation constant . (a) From find the relative permittivity , the conductivity and the loss tangent of the concrete. (b) Find and in the wall and the intrinsic impedance . (c) Just inside the wall the electric field amplitude is . Find the amplitude and phase of there, there, and after of concrete (reflections at the faces are not considered here).
Run Eq. (6.1.29) backwards:
so gives both material constants at once. Then , since by Eq. (6.1.22).
, , and
Hence and , that is
, against in air, and .
close to the lossless .
, lagging by . The power density just inside is
and after it is multiplied by :
Forward again: .
This is how material constants are measured in practice, by free-space or waveguide methods: and are read from phase and amplitude, and returns and without any approximation. A loss tangent of hardly changes or , but in a wall, plus the reflections at its two faces (Section 6.3), is why indoor mobile coverage is poorer than outdoors and worsens at higher bands. Lossy media are treated in full in Section 6.2.
cf. Problem 6.1.6