Original poster: Terrell Fritz <terrellfone@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Hi,
I recently pulled the PIRANHA SISG web site temporarily off-line
until I could improve the safety warnings and data. Since PIRANHA's
charging system can be "thrown together" very quickly, I am very
concerned that "anyone" could make a powerful (too powerful) system
without much "HV safety knowledge". With two old microwave ovens
and a screwdriver, I could put it together in about 1/2 hour... The
SISG gaps still serve an "entry barrier" for many, but that could
change very quickly as fully assembled boards become common...
In studying its safety and possible risks, I ran across this very
nice safety paper:
http://www.nclabor.com/osha/etta/indguide/ig18.pdf
Page 4 has a simple human body model and a graph that "sort of
determines" what various shock levels will do to a person. Such
data is easy to simulate with a circuit simulator to find peak and
RMS currents that make be delivered to a person in contact with
various parts of a Tesla coil system. The "death vs. time" and
levels that cause "fibrillation" as opposed to "just stopping" the
heart are pretty well explained...
PIRANHA actually delivers far less power than I thought into various
human fault loads (still easily deadly) but the added load is small
on fuses and other conventional safety devices. The output arcs
still stop, but the circuit "happily" fries the person instead...
So I was wondering if the human model in Figure 1 has a more
accurate version for voltages in the 5,000 to 25,000 volt
range? Also, if there is a larger graph like than in Figure 2 that
would extend into the 20 amp range? The graph could be extrapolated
for 2 orders of magnitude, but that might not be very good.
Hopefully, I can fairly well "predict" the effect of touching
various parts of the system in an effort to convince people that
they really need to be "super safe" and fully enclose and insulate
the thing like "I did" in my design. I also must ponder the known deaths:
http://hot-streamer.com/TeslaCoils/Misc/Deaths.txt
and what safety measures could be taken "today" to eliminate the
possibility of those specific accidents from recurring.
It would be nice if systems like PIRANHA were not only among the
easiest and most powerful Tesla coils, but also among the "safest"!!
There will be a "temptation" to "skip" the NST and low powered coils
by the "newbee" especially if systems like PIRANHA are "easier and
simpler" to make... I am not sure how to "empress" upon them the
extreme dangers of such high powered state of the art things... An
advanced high powered coil, but the simplest to make... It could be
a very "deadly" combination... Have to figure out how to "fix that" ;-)
All thoughts, public and private, welcome ;-))) I guess it is time
to push the safety warnings to "another level" now that we are
getting "too good" at this stuff ;-)
Cheers,
Terry
BTW - Interesting reading:
http://www-training.llnl.gov/training/hc/HVResearch/Grounding.html
http://pad39a.com/gene/shock.html
BBTW - I might have to "push" the "PIRANHA" trademark and patent
thing now... In today's world market, that is typically
worthless... But it does provide significant leverage in the case
of the "abuse" of the technology...