A special short course on 'Human Exposure to Electromagnetic Fields' was held recently at the Wesssex Institute of Technology, Southampton, UK. The Course Presenter was Prof Dragan Poljak from the University of Split, Croatia.
The objective of the course was to provide some fundamental information regarding human interaction with electromagnetic radiation, covering several aspects of incident and internal field dosimetry, thermal body response, biological effects, measurement techniques and safety standards regarding the possible radiation hazard with reference to the existing International Commission on Non-Ionizing Radiation Protection (ICNIRP) Guidelines for human exposure limits.
The course started with some general aspects of electromagnetic (EM) fields coupling to the human body and related possible radiation hazard. The introductory part provided a crash course in the fundamental concepts of electromagnetic theory followed by certain calculation and measuring techniques for the analysis of ELF and HF electromagnetic field sources from extremely low frequency (ELF) to high frequency (HF) range. The course continued by grasping the known coupling mechanisms between EM fields and the human body and by discussing the safety standards and protective measures.
The central part of the course dealt with the original presenter’s modelling approach related to the implementation of certain simplified and realistic representations of the human body, both based on the Boundary Element (BE) and Finite Element (FE) solution of the governing equations. The application of method of moments (MoM) and finite difference time domain (FDTD) methods were also presented. Theoretical considerations were followed by numerous practical examples (Human exposure to power lines, transformer substations, base station antennas and mobile phones.)
The last part of the course dealt with the thermal response of humans due to an absorbed EM energy featuring the solution of the bio-heat transfer equations via FEM.
The course finishes by grasping the known coupling mechanisms between EM fields and the human body and by discussing safety standards and protective measures.
Dragan Poljak received his BSc in 1990, his MSc in 1994 and PhD in 1996 from the University of Split, Croatia. He is Full Professor at the Department of Electronics at the University of Split, as well as Adjunct Professor at Wessex Institute of Technology. His research interests include frequency and time domain computational methods in electromagnetics, particularly in the numerical modelling of wire antenna structures, and recently numerical modelling applied to environmental aspects of electromagnetic fields. To date, Professor Poljak has published more than 170 journal and conference papers in the area of computational electromagnetics, four authored books and one edited book, by WIT Press, Southampton-Boston. Professor Poljak is a member of IEEE, a member of the Editorial Board of the journal Engineering Analysis with Boundary Elements, and co-chairman of the WIT International Conference on Computational Methods in Electrical Engineering and Electromagnetics. He is also editor of the WIT Press Series Advances in Electrical Engineering and Electromagnetics. As a young researcher he received the URSI Young Scientist’s Award and recently, Professor Poljak was awarded the National Prize for Science.
Wessex Institute