Abstract

Overview

The study addresses the assessment of human exposure to pulsed fields or waveforms with multi-frequency content, focusing on the precision of different methodological approaches.

Objective & Approach

The primary goal is to utilize suitable methods for quantifying uncertainties in human exposure assessments. Notably, the 'weighted peak method' (WPM), widely used in current standards and guidelines, is examined in both the time and frequency domains. The polynomial chaos expansion theory supports the uncertainty quantification.

• A thorough sensitivity analysis identifies critical parameters influencing the exposure index.
• The analysis outputs are used to develop a parametric analysis to assess uncertainty propagation.

Main Findings

The study demonstrates that the time domain implementation of WPM aligns well with fundamental electromagnetic induction and electrostimulation principles. However, the frequency domain version of WPM is overly sensitive to certain parameters, potentially falsely influencing the exposure index due to sharp phase variations centered on real zeros and poles.

Significance

The time domain version of the WPM offers greater accuracy and precision. The study proposes modifications to the phase definition of the weight function in the frequency domain to resolve existing issues. Enhanced access to the methodologies and codes used in the study is provided via a public GitHub repository.