Measurement and prediction of microshock currents and voltages in an HV laboratory

Microshocks are the low current, continuous discharges experienced by people capacitively coupled to high voltage equipment. The situations in which these discharges occur are complicated by the size and complexity of the high voltage equipment and the sensitivity of the person concerned. A simple model has been constructed in the commercial software package CDEGS. This has been used to model a geometrically simple object designed to represent a person adjacent to a high voltage tower. The predictions of the model are compared to experiments in a high voltage laboratory. The predictions are shown to be extremely accurate and suggest that CDEGS is capable of providing useful predictions in a more realistic scenario. © 2007 RPS.