Wednesday, 11 February 2015

Safety when experimenting with large currents


I am experimenting with large currents from ultra capacitor discharge.



For example with 500 A (at 2.8 V) you get a very impressive demonstration of the magnetic field of a straight conductor using compass needles or iron chips (compare: http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/0143-0807/31/1/L03/pdf).


Another example is the Thomson ring experiment http://www.rose-hulman.edu/~moloney/Ph425/0143-0807_33_6_1625JumpingRing.pdf where you may get up to 9000 A for a very short time.


Suppose all voltages used are below 60 V. What do you need to consider about safety in this case?


Here is what I think:



  • Since the voltage is too low, there should be no danger from current through the human body.

  • There might be a danger from sparks and lightening when if there are contact problems.

    • This may be dangerous because of UV light

    • and because of sparks hitting directly the eye




  • Also the there might be heat problems which makes thinks to vaporize which you may inhale

  • A capacitor discharge generates an EMP which may affect pacemakers for example


I am not sure if I mentioned all possible dangers concerning this. My question is:



  • Under which conditions (minimal current, discharge time...) which danger will become relevant

  • What to do to make it safe





No comments:

Post a Comment

arduino - Can I use TI's cc2541 BLE as micro controller to perform operations/ processing instead of ATmega328P AU to save cost?

I am using arduino pro mini (which contains Atmega328p AU ) along with cc2541(HM-10) to process and transfer data over BLE to smartphone. I...