Thread: Lightning delay
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Old Tue Sep 04, 2007, 12:22am
Suudy Suudy is offline
I Bleed Crimson
 
Join Date: Sep 2005
Posts: 477
I have to agree, in principle, with Mr Goodman. However, it is a lot more complicated than that. My college degree was in electrical engineering, though I admit I don't work in a field now that applies any such knowledge to high voltage situations (I'm a digital guy working at 5V or less).

We spent plenty of time on examples of applying Gauss's law to conducting enclosures. The best example is our professor sitting in a large wire mesh cage, i.e. a Faraday cage, about 5' x 5'. A student was challeged to try and shock the professor using a Tesla coil. The Faraday cage dissipated any charge before it could reach our professor. This exhibited the fact that the electric field inside a conducting enclosure is 0. Electricity always flows along the field lines of an electric field, from high potential to low potential (i.e. voltage). No electric field, no flow of electricity, no getting shocked.

However, I will say that all the examples we worked with, the gaps in the mesh were so close that they could effectively be ignored. Thus, for all purposes of calculation, it was a solid conductor. In the lightning example above, the gaps between the conductors may be too large to ignore. In this case, there may be an electric field in and around the field that could make it dangerous. I agree with NOAA, that the probability of being struck by lightning is extremely low, but not low enough for me to be confident standing on the field in a lightning storm. And also, with the possible electric field in and around the field, the ground currents, even if lightning struck a tower, could be dangerous.
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