Simulation of the Leakage Effect in Capacitive Sensing

In the measurement of mutual capacitance between electrodes both the coupling and the leakage effect contribute to the measurement result whereas the leakage mode is dominant in the selfcapacitance mode. While the coupling effect is mainly defined by the geometry and material distribution close to the electrodes, the root cause or modulation of the leakage effect may be far away from the electrode. In this paper we demonstrate that the leakage mode concept allows for simulation of 3D problems in 2D. This is useful in applications such as Electrical Capacitance Tomography or object classification as it allows simplifying the computational complexity while providing additional information compared to the classical 2D approach.