Development of a personal lightning shelter

This paper describes the design, construction and testing of a lightning shelter made of conductive textiles, ensuring it lightweight, portable and quickly deployable.It also describes some of the computer simulations and experimental tests performed in various high-voltage laboratories.To assess the protection of the shelter occupants and to avoid the use of animals as test objects, an instrumented dummy was developed to measure the voltages, currents and energy to which a user may be exposed during a direct lightning strike on the shelter.Finally, it is mentioned that future work should focus on evaluating the overall reduction in shelter costs for the use of the tested textiles, as well as the possible effects of intense electromagnetic fields generated by direct or nearby lightning discharges on the occupants of the lightning shelter.