Alright so, four friends and I are going to make up a dance routine for a youth camp (we're counselors) for the song Safety Dance by Men Without Hats and we need some kind of costumes to wear. We were thinking maybe construction workers, any thoughts or ideas?
Not very much, but it depends on the particular lightning bolt. Somewe don't know how manycarry enormous currents for long periods. What you have to know is the actual energy imparted by the strike on the loadthat is, your water. That particular figure is a bit tricky to come by, but it's lower than you might think: the resistors used in some lightning laboratories for wave-shaping purposes are merely plastic tubes filled with salty water, and they only get hot under unusual circumstances. (When that happens, they squirt salt water all over the equipment, which is no fun to clean up and the lab director becomes upset, too.) Most strokes do not carry current for long enough to melt anything: currents range to thousands of amperes, but only for a few microseconds. The standard IEEE lightning waveform rises to its maximum voltage (perhaps a couple of million volts, usually less) in 1.2 microseconds and then drops to half of its previous voltage every fifty microseconds thereafter. Lightning rods _can_ melt, but because most lightning strokes last for such a short period, the high currents don't flow for long enough to make things even warm. In an artificial lightning laboratory, we used very thin wire20-gauge tinned hookup wire, without insulationto make connections from Marx generator to wave-shaping network to whatever device we were testing. Note that this implies a belief that many objects which are struck by natural lightning show no damage, and it turns out that this is indeed the case. It makes research in the field of lightning damage amazingly difficult; things can be struck, but without a witness or instrumentation there's no way to tell if a strike actually took place.
A detailed procedure you can find by going to Gravimetric and Quantitative Measurements Using Barium Sulfate upon addition of the sodium sulfate to the warm barium nitrate solution.
