Well Ken, I always admire a man who will put his tongue on the battery for the sake of scientific knowledge. I also admire a man willing to put up with a little electrolyte for the sake of canine companionship. There is only one living entity that is ALWAYS happy to see you come home...your dog :-)
A couple of comments. According to "Electrical Engineering" by Carlson and Gisser; the threshold of sensation for the human body is about 1mA According to this same reference, the resistance through the human body varies from 500KOhm down to 1 KOhm depending upon whether the skin is wet or dry. You are probably correct about capacitance; and perhaps you have a good measurement of capacitance from your steady state measurements. If you go through the math, your body impedance with socks on does come out to about 10MOhm (according to your experiment, assuming the DMM has an internal impedance of 10MOhm). This impedance may be very much capacitive...and as a matter of fact, isn't that far from the human body capacitance values assumed for EN 1000-4-2 (330pF, I believe) I THINK THAT IT'S EUREKA TIME!!! Run with the human body model from EN 61000-4-2. Assume that the human body is a 330pF cap in-line with ...say 5K of resistance. If you perform a steady state calculation (calculating the impedance of the cap as 1/2piFC)...you'll get an AC impedance of 5KOhm + 8.038MOhm. If you divide 120VAC by this, you'll get micro amps...too little to feel. WE ALL FORGOT THE FIRST ASSUMPTION OF ELECTRICAL ENGINEERING...IMPEDANCE ASSUMES STEADY STATE. WHAT ABOUT THE INITIAL CONDITION? AT TIME ZERO, THE CAPACITOR LOOKS LIKE A SHORT CIRCUIT, LEAVING ONLY THE SERIES RESISTANCE In actuality, the one handed shock that you get is probably due to the in-rush current charging your body capacitance. The in-rush current may only last milliseconds; but that is probably long enough to feel it. If you really want to see the current, do a spice simulation with a 120VAC source. Put 330pF and 5Kohm in series with the source and run a .TRAN analysis on it. Then look at the current over the initial few milliseconds...it should be more like 120VAC/5Kohm...which would be 24mA...plenty enough to feel. So, it seems that a shock is quite a matter of luck, depending upon the potential that your body happens to be charged to when you put your hand on that hot conductor. Insulated footwear, pillows, carpets...will lessen the steady state current; but you're still going to get the in-rush as your body charges up to line potential from whatever potential it was at. Further comments? Chris Maxwell Design Engineer Nettest This message is from the IEEE Product Safety Engineering Society emc-pstc discussion list. Website: http://www.ieee-pses.org/ To post a message to the list, send your e-mail to [email protected] Instructions: http://listserv.ieee.org/listserv/request/user-guide.html List rules: http://www.ieee-pses.org/listrules.html For help, send mail to the list administrators: Ron Pickard: [email protected] Scott Douglas [email protected] For policy questions, send mail to: Richard Nute: [email protected] Jim Bacher: [email protected] All emc-pstc postings are archived and searchable on the web at: http://www.ieeecommunities.org/emc-pstc
