Getting strucked by lightning

Every now and then I’m struck with a moment of inspiration. Sometimes it’s productive, forward-thinking and important, but more often it’s just a little weird. When I’m playing with all my homemade electricity generating gadgets, I always seem to think up the weirdest scenarios and questions. This brings me to my most recent one: How much electricity can the human body take?

Obviously I want to know how much it can take pre-death. I’m not talking about tasing a body and recording the results. That’s no fun, just slightly psychotic and disturbing. I’ve always wondered how much electricity it takes to push a human over the barrier. As useless as this information might seem, it could come in useful should you want to pull some electricity themed human stunt (which I certainly don’t recommend).

Now, it’s important to differentiate between the different measures of electricity. It’s a commonly held belief that voltage can kill you, which is less than true. The human body can handle thousands of volts without harm, which is why tasers and other electronic immobility devices can have such a high voltage rating without any danger of killing or permanently injuring people.

In order to kill someone, there would need to be a combination of voltage and current running through their body. Voltage along doesn’t kill a human, or even likely harm one. A steady stream of voltage and current running to the heart and other vital organs would cause damage to a human body, ranging from light damage to permanent damage and death as the current increases.

There’s a third factor that you need to consider, which is the variable resistance that a human body can produce to combat the flow of electricity. Human bodies aren’t fantastic resistors, but they do provide some resistance to electrical flow. The higher the level of resistance, the lower the lower the flow of voltages. How is this important to calculating how much electricity a human can take? Well, the lower the flow of voltages throughout the human body, the greater the amount of electricity the body can take, and the lower the risk of death by electrocution.

If you need an uber-geeky tutorial on electrical currents, check out this equation:

I = E / R

Think of ‘I’ as the current, E as the voltage, and R as the resistance. When you put a voltage next to a high level of resistance, it’ll diminish in its results. You’ve got to be careful about this calculation, as often on the human body outside factors are introduced. If you’re wet when you’re electrocuted, you’ll be less resistant and more likely to die of electrocution. On the other hand, a relatively dry body will provide more resistance due to the lower levels of highly conductive moisture.

Hopefully this nerdy science lesson answered a few of your questions, and imprinted you with the idea to never, ever try and test this theory. While it’s unclear how much electricity a human body can take, it’s generally accepted that even low amounts of current can permanently damage the human body. Let this one stay as a bizarre thought in your head, not a thesis for a science experiment.

Alternator diagram

I know this is a little out of my element but I still think it’s interesting to see how an alternator works.

The name alternator is derived from the term AC which is an abbreviation of alternative current. An alternator is one of the three major parts of a charging system in a vehicle which produces power for the electrical components like the instrument panel, lights on the interior as well as the exterior of the car, radio, air conditioner etc. have you ever wondered how the alternator works and how does it produce electricity? You may be thinking that the buttery is giving all the necessary powers to run all the electrical components in your vehicle. This is absolutely true but in reality the necessary power comes from the gas tank of your vehicle. An alternator is the link between your gas tank and the battery of your vehicle.
The alternator has an aluminum casing on the outer side and the rotors and stators are within the alternator. The alternator is a kind of generator which is known for transforming mechanical energy into electrical energy. There are three sets of different windings wound on the iron stator frame which is round in shape.  Each winding consist of seven coils which are basically made up of number of different loops and are connected to each other in series with an intention to increase the total output of the voltage. There are therefore only two leads of winding which acts as the way for the inflow and outflow of the current. The leads of the windings are in wired in a Y-configuration in which one third of the stator is actually occupied by the three sets of windings. Each and every group of winding is expected to produce energy during one third of every revolution. Each phase of the winding consists of around 120 degrees out of the 360 degrees circular stator. Due to the three  phase of AC, the energy which is generated when the rotor comes in contact with the start is variable

The rotor generally has a lot of components, but the most important ones are the two slip rings which act as a connector of the coil wire to the battery of the car. Diodes become pretty important in case of a car as they require direct current. Diodes can be used as the alternating current is variable between the positive and negative current. The current is generated when the rotor poles revolve inside one of the stator coils. With the help of the diodes you the alternating current can be converted into direct current and this process is also known as rectification.
Once the energy is converted into direct current voltage regulators play an important role to determine the level of energy to be outpoured from diode. This is how an alternator generates electricity.