One of the technicians pushed a trolley with a loose steel spanner on it into a lab with a 16.5T superconducting magnet running at full field. The spanner was travelling so fast when it hit that it made it through the outer casing, the outer vacuum space, the outer liquid nitrogen shield, the middle vacuum space, the inner liquid nitrogen shield, the inner vacuum space and the liquid helium containment before hitting the magnet itself.
I think I'm glad I had a nice, safe job that only involved field work in the Arctic and Antarctic and flying in small aircraft hundreds of miles from the nearest help, in marginal visibility and with inadequate navigational systems! Mind, all that pales into insignificance besides teaching a course where some of the participants were substantially senior to me...
Overly complex.
Indeed. It saved on the copper and complexity of a mains transformer. The valve filaments all wired in series running off the AC mains and the HT rectified off the mains...EHT was more interesting. But that’s another story.
That’s because the energy stored and then capable of being discharged very rapidly in a 12v lead acid battery is huge. Nothing directly connected with the potential to electrocute anyone.True, I should have said electrocutes, per the thread titleI've seen the result of a short circuited 12v DC exploding in someone's face though
I think you got your AC and DC mixed up in your first sentence. Surely it’s AC that (hopefully) throws you off and DC that grabs...?
As others have said: complete twaddle. Dangerously wrong in fact.
ditto
I've had a distinct tingle from a 24v system,trying to connect a pump in a boat that was flooding when working with wet hands. I know, but it was an emergency!
Oops! You're right, got them mixed up.
No problem. It’s a long time since my Electrical Engineering quals doing day release from the Royal Radar Establishment and it made me think twice.
I think you win.
Not sure about winning or losing - we are both still here, so I guess that's a win-win situation! But I still recall the time when the pilot was letting the co-pilot get some experience at the controls, and I looked out of the window and realized that we were a long way off course - and we were on our way home, with a modest fuel margin! Fortunately, I had been to Svalbard several times more than the aircrew and recognized where we were and could indicate which way we should turn. But it's fortunate I happened to look out of the window at a point where the terrain was readily recognizable if you knew it. The other hairy moment was with the same aircrew when we were flying survey lines along valley glaciers, with a low cloud ceiling, mostly about the same as the mountain tops we were flying between. Because of the nature of the survey (and the low cloud) we had to fly below the mountain tops, and of course, were passing over cols to get from one valley to the next. Fine as long as the cloud base was higher than the height of the col. But on one occasion the cloud base was LOWER than the height of the col, we were committed to going over it (I don't think there was room for the Twin Otter to turn ) and on the say-so of my colleague who was map-reading (this was long before precision real-time satellite navigation) and assured the pilot there were no obstacles, he took us through the cloud. I'm still here, but it's the sort of thing you read about as "pilot error" in AIB reports!
I think I should point out that the aircrew and aircraft's main business was spraying detergent onto oil-slicks, with crop spraying as a sideline. I've been around enough pilots to know the reputation of crop-sprayers! I think the kindest thing I've heard said is that they're all high on the fumes from the spray... The adage about old pilots and bold pilots comes to mind.