Simulation of the Leakage Effect in Capacitive Sensing

In the measurement of mutual capacitance between electrodes both the coupling and theleakage effect contribute to the measurement result whereas the leakage mode is dominant in the self-capacitance mode. While the coupling effect is mainly defined by the geometry and materialdistribution close to the electrodes, the root cause or modulation of the leakage effect may be far awayfrom the electrode. In this paper we demonstrate that the leakage mode concept allows for simulation of3D problems in 2D. This is useful in applications such as Electrical Capacitance Tomography or objectclassification as it allows simplifying the computational complexity while providing additionalinformation compared to the classical 2D approach.