At 17.11 21/02/2004 -0500, you wrote:
>Remember that although you may not have an 'ohmic' or conductive path to
>ground, you are likely to be capacitively coupled to ground. When measuring
>the voltage from yourself to the 230V line with a high impendence voltmeter
>you may see a small voltage. This is because you have created an AC voltage
>divider with several elements: the voltmeter (1 or 10M ohm typical
>impedance), you (? ohms) and the capacitive coupling between you and ground
>(? ohms at 60hz).
>
>Now, assuming for the sake of concrete numbers:
>
>Rmeter = 1Mohm
>Ryou = 0ohm    (worst case - highest current)
>Rcap = 19Mohm
>V = 240V
>
>Then your meter would show a voltage of :
>     1M/(1M+19M)*240V = 12V
>
>Oh, and the current would be
>    240V / 20Mohm = 12 microamps (should be quite safe)
>
>Now, you can test this theory be placing a 1M resistor in parallel with the
>voltmeter. Now the voltage read on the meter should be:
>
>    500K/(500K+19M)*240V = 6.15V
>
>And this time the current is
>
>Now, as far as your burning the LED lead: in order to get enough current to
>do that, you must have accidentally connected with a real ground somewhere,
>I would think. Please describe in more detail the physical arrangement of
>your experiment.

That mains plug is faulty.. weird, because it's a new one.

The whole experiment is invalid because of this.. but better so, it was
scare if it was a capacitive effect, considering how big that spark has
been.

I replaced the plug, but didn't want to retry the experiment anyway.

I learnt that it's better not to make such experiments.. you never know
what can go wrong.

Thank you all for all the good advice and for the excellent technical
discussion. Now I know much more than I did before.. my love for electronics
got bigger, and my love for live and health as well. ;)

On the other hand, could anybody give a deep technical explanation of
capacitors (I mean the electronic components)?
Do nucleis' protons play any active role/effect in capacitors? Or it's
all only about electrons (but then again, aren't electrons attracted by
atoms that lack some of their electrons and thus the nucleis' protons
attract external electrons)?


>
>Bob Ammerman
>RAm Systems
>
>--
>http://www.piclist.com hint: PICList Posts must start with ONE topic:
>[PIC]:,[SX]:,[AVR]: ->uP ONLY! [EE]:,[OT]: ->Other [BUY]:,[AD]: ->Ads

--
http://www.piclist.com hint: PICList Posts must start with ONE topic:
[PIC]:,[SX]:,[AVR]: ->uP ONLY! [EE]:,[OT]: ->Other [BUY]:,[AD]: ->Ads