Simulation of Electrical Shock Safety of Human Body for FCV Electrical Units

This paper describes the safety test simulation of electrical shock of FCV (Fuel Cell Vehicles) on human. Since FCV operates with high voltage, it is very dangerous to touch on or near the conductive parts. It may hurt human even when conductive parts are surrounded by protectors such as barriers or enclosures. Also various modes of a vehicle, such as driving, idle and failure, can affect electrical shock. It is difficult to carry out field experiments about electrical shock for FCV because of many combinations which depend on the operating voltages and the modes of a vehicle. And electrical safety of FCV must be verified before the manufacturing process. These are the main purposes of this study.

MATLAB Simulink is the tool to conduct the simulation. All of the electronic devices in an FCV and a human body were modeled to measure current through human body when human touches on FCV. We performed the simulation with respect to driving, idle and failure mode. Result of this study shows that in case of the isolation resistances between the electrical units and the electrical chassis are less than 221.7 kΩ (DC) or 66.3 kΩ (AC), when human body is modeled as 500 Ω resistances, it may cause severe damage on human. The proposed simulation method can be used to establish the standard value of isolation resistance and the standard value of electrical shock on human.