• Journal of the Korean Society of Safety
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• v.28 no.3
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• pp.56-62
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• 2013

The occurrence of the ventricular fibrillation is directly dependent on the magnitude and duration of the current. The current which flows through the human body is proportional to the touch voltage applied across the body and is in inverse proportion to the impedances in the circuit. The circuit impedances consist of human body impedance, line impedance, equipment impedance, earth terminal impedance and impedance of shoes which a person put on. The impedance of shoes greatly affect the severity of the electric accidents. The human body impedances relevant to the contact areas, contact conditions, current paths and touch voltages are already determined in the IEC 60479-1. However, the impedance of shoes is ignored or substituted by a simple value because of the absence of the sufficient data. For example, the impedance of shoes plus ground contact resistance is postulated to be $1,000{\Omega}$ in the IEC 61200-612. In IEEE 80, the shoe resistance plus ground contact resistance is assumed to be bare foot with ${\rho}/4b{\Omega}$. In this paper, we measured and analyzed the impedance of shoes with respect to conditions such as applied weight, environment variables and voltages. The results showed that the impedance of shoes is dependent on environment variables regardless of the types of shoes. Most of shoes showed the correlation with the applied force, whereas a few shoes showed characteristics related to the applied voltage. In terms of severity of electric shock, one thirds of test samples indicated to be dangerous in saltwater conditions.