The Impact from Pandemic Lockdown on the Electromagnetic Interference Environment

One consequence of the pandemic lockdown . due to Covid-19 has in some cases been a significant decrease of traffic volumes from vehicles. At some borders, the decrease of personal car traffic was significantly reduced during the lockdowns in the spring of 2020. Since vehicles can contribute to the background electromagnetic interference environment, it is of interest to investigate if the pandemic lockdown has led to any observable differences in measured background electromagnetic interference levels. Measurements have been done in the civilian GPS-frequency band in the vicinity of the bridge over Öresund, between Sweden and Denmark. A significant reduced level of electromagnetic interference can be seen as a result of the lockdown in the spring of 2020. Furthermore, these measurement results indicate that passenger cars have the largest contribution to the interference in the GPS-band.

Read more

Interference Risks from Wireless Power Transfer for Electric Vehicles

The electrification . is an ongoing technical paradigm shift in the auto industry. In this change, wireless power transmission (WPT) for electrical vehicle (EV) charging is a new enabling feature to wirelessly transfer power. However, its potential impact on other systems has not been investigated in depth. As aggravating circumstance, the frequencies for WPT-EV are also used by radio communication systems or services. Since WPT-EV is a new technology, there is a lot of work going on in the world in evolving the technology itself, but also in investigating interference in other systems and setting emission limits. There is, for example, a working group within the ITU-R that is examining the possible impact of WPT-EV on the radio communication services operating in the same or adjacent frequencies. There are several proposed frequency bands for WPT-EV with different characteristics.

Read more

EMC Analysis of Complex Interference Environments

The ongoing technical development . towards increased densities of co-located electronic systems together with new unintentional interference sources requires analyses of considerable more complex interference environments than before. To handle such environments, dedicated analysis tools and methods are needed to handle larger amounts of electronic systems as well as measurement data from emission measurements. In this paper, some of these challenges are discussed and examples of possible analysis methods are shown.

Read more

New technologies and EMI surprises

This article addresses . the situation when you believe that all EMC aspects are under control since you have applied regular EMC standards the way you normally do – and then you get surprised by finding that you have electromagnetic interference (EMI) in the field operation, causing troubles for your customers. And even worse: your customers get the surprise first before you know anything, leaving you in the hot spot of explaining why this is happening.

Read more

Antagonistic electromagnetic threats to civil defence systems

Offprint from strategic outlook 8 . . Many of today’s vital societal functions rely on electronic control systems and wireless communication systems, such as GPS, mobile phones, and Wi-Fi. Cyberattacks with malicious code have become frequent, but since wireless communication systems and unprotected electronics can also be sensitive to electromagnetic (EM) threats, such as jammers and microwave weapons, intentional EM interference constitutes a tangible threat to civil defence capabilities and their potential to support military defence. It is therefore important that EM threats are considered in the risk and vulnerability analyses that authorities, municipalities, county councils, regions, and private enterprises with operations within civil defence are obliged to perform on their undertakings, especially concerning operative capability during a heightened state of alert.

Read more

Artificial Intelligence for Autonomous Monitoring of Unintentional Electromagnetic Interference

The rapid increase . of wireless systems in safety- and security applications gives a need for automatic monitoring of electromagnetic interference in the vicinity of critical applications. Depending on the actual application of the wireless service, such monitoring might for instance be motivated for safety or security reasons. For efficiency reasons, such automatic monitoring techniques also need to be both cost efficient and relatively easy to use for the operator. The latter requires decision support in terms of methods for automatic analyses and classification of the collected interference data. In this article, the possibility of using Artificial Intelligence for these needs is discussed and exemplified.

Read more

EMC in Product Development (Part 8)

This article is a part of a series of texts that will deal with the EMC challenge in terms of project management and the practical EMC activities at different stages in the project flow. Different companies all have their own way of describing their project flow, so to keep it simple we will use the labels as given in Figure 1. We can call it a generic project flow. The picture only describes the basic outline of the work packages. These articles will describe the actual practical work we want to do in the project to “make EMC work” in a time- and cost-efficient way. Each part of our series will fill in the details for each part piece by piece. This is the final 8th part – The Fast Track – in the series of articles.

Read more

How will 6G affect EMC?

The development within . the next generation of mobile technologies is going on for 5G. At the same time, research has already started for the future 6G. This research is in its initial stages and no agreements about key technical parameters and standards have yet been done. However, some suggestions on general principals and goals have been published from different actors. It is therefore interesting to see how these visions will affect the area of Electromagnetic Compatibility (EMC) in a larger sense.

Read more

Practical Consequences of Electromagnetic Interference in Wireless Applications

The use of wireless applications . is continuously increasing in the society. Together with the overall increased use of electronics in general, the total electromagnetic environment is increasing around wireless systems. The effect of interference does not always appear as interruption in communication, but can appear as more or less gradually performance degradation for the user. In this article, some of these interference consequences are discussed and examplified.

Read more

EMC in Product Development (Part 7)

This article . is a part of a series of texts that will deal with the EMC challenge in terms of project management and the practical EMC activities at different stages in the project flow.
Different companies all have their own way of describing their project flow, so to keep it simple we will use the labels as given in Figure 1. We can call it a generic project flow. The picture only describes the basic outline of the work packages. These articles will describe the actual practical work we want to do in the project to “make EMC work” in a time- and cost-efficient way. Each part of our series will fill in the details for each part piece by piece. This is the 7th part – The aftermath – in our process.

Read more