New Member Faraday Cage ?

Faraday cage ? i read recently that if you put some electronic device in a faraday cage if there is a emp or electromagnetic pulse then the items inside it would be protected ? does anyone here know about this stuff and can give reliable information . what about a car ? would it work if it was in a faraday cage

 

If the car is built of steel it's chassis is effectively a Faraday cage and your car should be fine as long as the engine is turned off and delicate electrical components isolated from the chassis during an EMP. Any conductive metal box can be used as a Faraday cage as long as the contents or delicate components are insulated/isolated from the outer metal casing. There is some debate over whether the box needs to be earthed (grounded) but I prefer to earth mine.
Mesh can also be used, I'm unsure what size mesh/gauge wire would be needed for it to be effective because I have no idea of the magnitude of surge it will need to handle but again it needs to be able to conduct the surge around whatever it is you are protecting.

 

Nice bit of research Keith, as far as I know turning off the engine at the ignition is enough to isolate most vehicles. I guess that research backs that up.

 

Yes, excellent work.
Bill

 

Very interesting. I always thought an EMP would in fact kill a newer vehicle completely. I think it was circa '82 when all those fancy chips were installed.

 

The thing about an emp is that it will/could take down the infrastructure. Having a faraday cage to protect your personal electronics is of questionable use. What good is a cell phone radio, TV, or even most communication radios without service or repeaters and the same is sort of true in the long run for your computers and such. Even if your car keeps running, with the power grid down fuel will be hard to get to. I actually have a hand powered pump that will allow me to pump gasoline up out of a tank in the event of a disaster.

Unless you are someone that checks the solar activity on a regular basis like I do you will have to keep your stuff in that cage all the time and the same is true of an EMP caused by a nuclear air burst. There just isn't going to be a lot of warning.

http://www.spaceweather.com/

https://solarscience.msfc.nasa.gov/SunspotCycle.shtml

Solar spots run in 11 year cycles and we are at the bottom of the chart near zero right now. We had several near misses at the last solar maximum though. If we get hit dead on by an X class solar mass ejection it is going to rock our boat severely. In the simplest sense sunspots are like the bubbles in boiling water. When the water is boiling furiously it will throw water out of the pot as the bubbles pop. The sun in general ranges from a slow simmer at the solar minimum to a wildly boiling rage at the maximum. The amount varies from cycle to cycle the last maximum around 2013 was pretty mild as far as numbers where as the one around 2002 was a beast. That said we had a near miss in 2012 that would have crashed a lot of our infrastructures. Fortunately the sun throws this stuff in all directions and it is relatively a narrow band. Our little planet is a pretty small moving target. Nonetheless it is inevitable that we are going to get hit. The last big one was in 1859 and if something similar happened now it would be a massive shitstorm!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_storm_of_1859

https://www.extremetech.com/extreme...-sent-us-back-to-a-post-apocalyptic-stone-age

 

That I didn't know. Would a grounding wire work to ground it?

 

The hand powered pump may be of little use if the tanks you're trying to drain are buried as deep as they are over here. Putting a pipe with sufficient vacuum to lift the petrol (gasoline)from the tanks causes it to change state from liquid to gas, because it's so much more volatile then other liquids we deal with on a daily basis this can catch us out because in this state it's a little more dangerous.
A method for stealing fuel over here uses an electric 12 volt pump small enough to be inserted part way down the fill pipe to the tank meaning that only half of your pipe will be suction and the other half will be under pressure. This ensures that the gasoline remains liquid. The wiring must be completely shrouded and taped.

Another method is to lift fuel using a non flammable compressed gas (CO2 for instance) passed slowly down a narrow bore pipe within a slightly larger diameter pipe that projects by about its diameter beyond the narrow bore pipe. As the CO2 comes out of the end of the narrow pipe it forms bubbles, they seek to rise up the slightly wider pipe and carry fuel up with them. It's fiddly but it works.
Of course none of this is necessary if you run a diesel. Heavy fuel oil is often stored above ground, especially around farms or industrial units.
All of these fuels will have a finite shelf life though so don't bank them lasting

An EMP will be likely to shatter economies. That would be in no ones national interest, not even Russia or China. If Russia screwed over the economies of the developed world it would face starvation in short order. China has invested heavily in the west. I worry more about the actions of rogue powers or religious fundamentalists from the Middle East in this regard.

 

I don't think a car actually needs additional grounding but I prefer to have earth bonding wires and lightning conductors on any fixed steel structures. Like I said in an earlier post there is a bit of a debate.

 

Anything subject to an EMP or similar and is not grounded will produce internal magnetic eddies in its cage, these eddies will produce heat and many conflicting magnetic fields etc, not a real problem.
Grounding will uniform those eddies and discharge them to earth not a real problem, but grounded items may get a reverse charge from earth from the EMP, so anything used as a faraday cage that is earthed also needs to be well isolated electricily.

 

The gasoline tanks at gas stations here are just under the surface. They check the levels in them with a ten foot wooden dipstick with marks on it so you probably only have to lift it about five or six feet. I've never heard of gasoline changing state from a liquid to a gas no matter how far down it was. Natural gas here in Texas though is under pressure and if you have a well on your property you don't need a pump. My wife's Grandparents had gas lights all over their yard, gas heat and gas cook stove all for free because it was just a side benefit of having oil wells in their backyards. There are places around here where you can light up your water at the faucet from a water well that has some natural gas in it. My high school had 4 oil wells on the property and my deer lease was covered up with them.

The in ground gasoline tanks here have 4 to 6 inch access ports so I guess you could dip it out with a narrow gauge well bucket too.

https://www.amazon.com/Galvanized-W...sr=8-1-spons&keywords=water+well+bucket&psc=1

 

Essentially Texdanm, lowering the atmospheric pressure by creating a vacuum lowers the boiling point of any liquid. Since gasoline is already a volatile liquid with a low boiling temp. its surface area boils if you apply enough vacuum to lift it any great distance and it turns gaseous. This in turn increases the pressure in the pipe above the liquid forcing it down again hard enough to overcome the vacuum created by the pump. It all gets a bit interesting from that point.
When it happens in your cars fuel system it's often described as vapour lock.

 

I understand about change of state. In a vacuum water becomes a gas too but if you pump liquid this problem doesn't pop up otherwise a gas station would have to have above ground tanks to avoid this problem. The way around this is by priming the pump with liquid first and not just trying to suck the liquid up with a vacuum. In a refinery they pump gasoline all over the place. It is then stored in huge tanks and then pumped from those into the trucks for delivery. I was raised surrounded by refineries and as a machines rebuilt pumps and heat exchangers for them. About half of the people that I grew up with worked in those refineries. I prefered doing service work for them rather than work directly for them and do their shift work where you changed shift every two weeks and worked two weekends a month.

Gasoline can actually be used as a refrigerant as can ammonia and propane. AC and refrigeration is based on the energy transfer that happens as things change state. I've actually worked on ammonia and propane based systems and heard of gasoline based ones from the early days of refrigeration. The various CFCs and HCFCs replaced most of the more exotic things except for RV type Refrigeration and Medical level freezers that operate at temperatures down as near absolute zero as possible. At those temperatures propane is a liquid and is used. Ammonia systems can be operated without electricity so they are used in RVs a lot. In general different refrigerants are used based on the operating temperatures that you will want in the evaporator. I'm a licensed HVAC tech and also worked on wells and pumps and appliances is the only reason I know all this stupid crud.

 

I've never heard of earth bonding wires and lightning conductors is pseudo familiar to me. I need to study on electronics at some point.

 

Earth bonding wires connect and ground metallic components such as water pipes that might otherwise accumulate a static build up, a lightning conductor it an elevated metal mast (often decorative ironwork) connected by a very thick lead or copper wire direct to an earth point that is independent of the buildings electrical supply system. The wire should be routed and mounted in such a way that it cannot induce a surge in any adjacent household electrical wiring.