Common-mode radiation resulting from hand-assembled cable bundles on automotive platforms

A statistical cable harness model is developed to account for the random disturbance of the wire positions along hand-assembled bundles. The non-uniform random bundles are modeled as n -cascaded segments of uniform multi-conductor transmission line. At each section, all wire positions are disturbed with random numbers obeying a Gaussian distribution. In addition, a spline interpolation function is used to improve the smoothness of wires winding along the bundle. The common-mode current distribution along the bundle calculated with SPICE is injected into a full-wave tool, e.g., FDTD, as impressed current sources. Thus, the full-vehicle electromagnetic emissions from the automotive harness can be predicted efficiently. The model has been experimentally validated with a controlled laboratory setup.