EXTERNAL AND INTERNAL ELECTROMAGNETIC EXPOSURES OF WORKERS NEAR HIGH VOLTAGE POWER LINES

The major objective of the study was to assess the safety of electric line workers exposed to of a double circuit 132kV transmission line for difierent scenarios. The double circuit 132-kV, 60Hz transmission line has a power rating of 293 MVA and a maximum recorded peak load current of 603A. The charge simulation and the Biot Savart methods were used by EPRI workstation software to compute the external electric and magnetic flelds around a 132kV transmission line. We used the calculated external electric and magnetic fleld exposures to determine the induced electric fleld and induced current densities inside the human body. This was performed using the Finite Difierence Time Difierence computational algorithm in EMPIRE commercial software, with a 6mm voxel resolution. We used the Visible Human (VH) to investigate the internal induced electric fleld and circulating current densities in more than 40 difierent tissues and organs of the VH. We found that the worker exposure levels to extremely low frequency electromagnetic flelds are below the recommended IEEE international standards limits for the studied scenarios. In all scenarios the maximum induced current densities and electric flelds were in the bone marrow of the feet.