Personal Lightning Protection - Calculations

what makes you believe this?

This means that a human whose charge is equal to the ground

really?

relitive to ground? what are your sources of information?

This means

and if the person isnt there the lightning will not hit the ground?

Small wonder, then, that lightning seeks

becuse thay are taller? metal golf spikes?

or you could drive in a ground stake and silver solder an oxigen free speaker wire to his ear?

Thus a person should become invisible to virtually all lightning

wonderfull... lets all don 18kV metal helmets to protect outselves from lightning which according to Lloyds of London the odds of the average person getting hit is 500,000 to 1 (i read this somewhere)

just try to get OSHA to approve it... you haven't seen difficult

im dieing here... can barely type

Thomas, the human body is not a capacitor that you can charge up, is more of a resistor/conductor. once you have a certain difference in potential current flows through the body.

as the current increases the heart and other vital organs stop working. further current increases cause burning and heating.

while its true that a form of photography called Kirlian puts people and objects on a high voltage plate THEY ARE NOT GROUNDED AT THE SAME TIME.

lets just say that you could repel lightning with an equal an opposite electrical charge... how do you know what that charge will be? and if you do match potentials what happens as the storm continues moving and the potential increases?

there is a market for lightning prevention. buildings and towers suffer from "hits" on a regular basis. the most common method is the lightning rod which (hopefully) attracts the lightning and channels it safely to ground. another method involves placing hundreds or thousands of pointy spikes around the object to be protected. i don't understand the theory behind this well but many radio and TV broadcasters swear by it, particularly in Florida, the so called lightning capitol of the US. a picture of one type here

hummm... i wonder if a hat with a thousand metal points on it is marketable?

You are only considering voltage. The current from a strike is 10,000 to 100,000+ amps and vaporizes normal size copper wire instantly. The magnetic field from the current flow is another minor consideration.

If you had copper on the bottom of your shoes, with a wire going up to your hat, you can act like a lightning magnet, because the lines of potentioal are closer together from your head on up.

Some good books around on this subject.

On Mon, 23 Aug 2004 21:39:16 +0200, Thomas Scarborough put forth the notion that...

What, negatively charging a person's body with 18,000 volts so they won't get hit by lightening? Sounds like a great idea. You probably wouldn't have to worry about contracting West Nile virus either, because you'd be a human bug zapper.

when it comes to lightning it is difficult to prove that any system or procedure is effective. the best you can hope for is to try something and see of the mean time between failures increases. im my case it is often dufficult to determine if damage was caused by direct lightning or spikes in the power lines due to wind/interuptions.

sometimes on AM towers when the ball gap at the base of the tower is melted off i can be pretty sure it was lightning that started the arc... but if the transmitter dosent shut down the RF power can sustain the arc until the equipment melts far enough apart to stop it.

Overhead conductors or rods with

last week an AM tower took a hit. the solid state flasher, mounted in a box on the tower shorted. the flasher had .1 uF rf bypass capacitors between each terminal and to "ground" (in AM the tower is the driven element and sits on a insulator) the caps were blown apart, physicly in 2 peices. the AC is coupled to the tower, in this case, by an austin ring transformer.

220 in 110 out.

im thinking of adding a TVSS unit between the flasher and the beacon. i already have solid state TVSS at the power main. anyone think it will help?

transformer.

Frankly I have only looked at power system protection. The TVSS unit is not familiar to me. Can't help you at present. I assume that the flasher unit is tied to the tower but isolated from ground. How long are the leads up from the flasher box to the light? In any case you are absolutely right about prediction of lightning and what path it will, in fact, actually take- generally not the one that you want it to take. .

... About 1 out of every 20 lighting strikes is Positive (cloud) to Ground (negative) at much greater magnitude. So if you are walking around with a negative 18,000 volts on your head, you would actually be attracting these "Super Bolts". Probably not a good idea.

Beachcomber

generic term for Transient Voltage Surge Suppression.

heat sink to metal weatherproof box bonded to tower... but the flasher is a

3 terminal "cube".

How long are the leads up from the flasher

about 300 ft.

i try to look on the bright side... if nothing ever breaks they wouldn't need me

maybe what we need is a sensor to detect imminent lightning strikes which would fire "chaff" in such a way that it would create an umbrella effect which guides the bolt away from the area needing protection

Get two lightning hats. One with +18kV, one with -18kV. Let two friends wear them.

j

You will need another 11 friends to be pallbearers.

Yup, and if the funeral is on a a stormy day, for heaven's sake make sure two of them wear the hats.

j