High voltage arc discharge is a method to pasteurize liquid foods by applying rapid discharge voltages through an electrode gap below the surface of aqueous suspensions of microorganisms. Inactivation of microorganisms and enzymes contained in food products by electrical discharges began in the 1920s with the electropure process for milk. This process consisted of passing an electrical current ...

This paper reviews the 100-year history of federal electrical safety research in the U.S mining industry, originally by the US Bureau of Mines, and as carried on today by NIOSH. First, there is a brief historical review of the use of electrical power in mining and an examination of the associated shock, fire, and explosion hazards. These hazards were the impetus for government intervention to i...

Electron force field (eFF) wave-packet molecular-dynamics simulations of the single shock Hugoniot are reported for a crystalline polyethylene (PE) model. The eFF results are in good agreement with previous density-functional theories and experimental data, which are available up to 80 GPa. We predict shock Hugoniots for PE up to 350 GPa. In addition, we analyze the structural transformations t...

Present day increasing dependence on electricity, in both home and work environments, can lead, if the necessary precautions are not met, to a wide type of injuries, from cutaneous burns to important visceral lesions. We report the case of a 44 year-old male with cutaneous and severe visceral lesions, paresis and paresthesia of the right upper limb induced by a high energy electrical shock. No ...

Thresholds for sensation, pain, and tolerance were obtained from 20 male and 20 female observers who received trains of electrical pulses applied to the volar forearm. Also determined were estimates of sensory magnitude for a series of stimuli that spanned the pain sensitivity range (PSR) between pain threshold and tolerance, as well as Weber fractions for the discrimination of stimuli at the m...

Electrical injuries are becoming more common and are increasingly imaged with advanced technologies, such as MR imaging. However, the MR imaging findings of such injuries remain largely unstudied. We report a high-voltage electrical injury to the cerebral corticospinal tracts and document evolution on serial MR images.

There has been a relative absence of studies that have longitudinally examined the neuropsychological profiles of women who have sustained severe accidental electrical shocks. A case is reported of a college-educated woman who received an estimated 120-V electrical shock. Neuropsychological assessments conducted at 2 months, and at 1 and 2 years postinjury, revealed a diversity of deficits indi...

Shock-induced vulnerability and defibrillation have been mostly studied in structurally normal hearts. However, defibrillation therapy is normally applied to patients with diseased hearts, frequently those with prior myocardial infarction (MI). Shock-induced vulnerability and defibrillation have not been well studied under this condition. We sought to examine the mechanisms of shock-induced arr...

The resistivities of specimens ofSi02 (fused quartz) singly and doubly shocked in the 10-45 and 27-90 GPa ranges, respectively, demonstrate a marked decrease from values of10-0.1 11-m at a single-shock pressure of -40 and a double-shock pressure of 7 4 G Pa. These states correspond to calculated shock temperatures of3300 and -3600 K, respectively. At shock pressures below 36 GPa the measured re...