Analysis of electric field induced by ELF magnetic field utilizing fast‐multipole surface‐charge simulation method for voxel data

This paper presents a fast‐multipole surface‐charge‐simulation method for calculating three‐dimensional Laplacian fields in voxel models. This method treats a surface of a voxel that has different inside and outside conductivities as a surface element of the indirect BEM (boundary element method). The main features of the proposed method are as follows. (1) An O(D²) performance in the memory capacity and operation cost is provided by applying the diagonal form fast multipole method (FMM), when the number of voxels is about D³. (2) The boundary matching is imposed by the continuity of the total flux passing through each element, which guarantees the solution globally satisfying Gauss's law; therefore the solution is globally stabilized. This method is successfully applied to calculate the electric field induced by an applied homogeneous ELF (extremely low frequency) magnetic field in a human head model that has 1 mm ×1 mm 1 mm voxel size. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Electr Eng Jpn, 165(4): 1–10, 2008; Published online in Wiley InterScience ( www.interscience.wiley.com ). DOI 10.1002/eej.20529