International Journal of Applied Electromagnetics and Mechanics 14 (2001/2002) 365–368 365 IOS Press Magnetically induced currents in a three-dimensional human body model Carmen Golovanov, Daniela Urma * , Mihaela Albu and D. Ioan Electrotechnical Department, “Politehnica” University, 313, Splaiul Independentei St., 77206, Bucharest, Romania Abstract. Transmission and distribution lines together with the power transformers produce electromagnetic fields that represent a subject for many controversial issues. A special problem is to evaluate the electric field induced in a human body, when this is exposed to low-frequency magnetic field. In this paper, a 3D human body model is proposed in order to determine the current densities induced by a 50 Hz magnetic field. 1. Introduction Lately, researchers focused their work [1,2] on both theoretical and experimental aspects concerning the induced currents determining problems. Until now, many of the experiments were realized on animals or they used simplified models to approximate the human body. In order to obtain the values necessary in an accurate analysis valid also for humans, one should extrapolate the experimental data. This can not be easily realized as long as there isn’t a theoretical method to forecast the interactions between the low-frequency electromagnetic fields and the human body, yet. A lot of theoretical studies concerning the numerical computation of the induced currents in human body used either simplified geometries or the not-precisely methods. Shiau and Valentino [3] worked on the spherical models for the human body, so their results may have a reduced practical value. Spiegel [4] used a more precisely bloc model and an integral equation method to compute the induced electric field, but he used an insufficient distribution for numerical computation. This paper presents the finite elements method used on a three-dimensional human body geometry to compute the currents induced by a magnetic field. 2. Geometry, hypothesis The modeled domain was divided into 21889 elementary volume elements with FLUX-3D software. The numerical method chosen to compute the currents induced in a human body by a sinusoidal magnetic field is the finite element method (FEM). The modeled domain contains two regions: the human body, the conductor region and the outside region where it is air. The problem formulation deals with the * Corresponding author: Daniela Urma, Tel.: +4 092168492; Fax: +40 1 411119; E-mail: daniela@electro.masuri.pub.ro. 1383-5416/01/02/$8.00  2001/2002 – IOS Press. All rights reserved