Human exposure in arc-welding processes: current versus previous ICNIRP basic restrictions

This work deals with human exposure of workers to electromagnetic fields generated by manual arc-welding processes, and focuses on the comparison between current ICNIRP basic restrictions (2010), defined as internal electric field values, and previous ICNIRP basic restrictions (1998), still in force in the EU till the Directive 2004/40/EC will be revised, defined in terms of induced current density. To this aim, numerical simulation is used to mimic the exposure setup defined in Standard EN 50444, in the severe case of Tungsten Inert Gas (TIG) welding involving square-wave currents. It is shown that application of the new ICNIRP Guidelines leads to a significant reduction of the exposure index.