Personal lightning Shelter protection using electroconductive fabrics

•To protect the lives of people exposed to lightning currents in open fields and backcountry places, special attention should be given to ground current mechanism.•Tests were conducted with high-currents on an A-frame survival lightning shelter prototype constructed using an electrically conductive textile in a high-voltage laboratory.•An instrumented dummy with posing capability was developed and used to measure the voltages that appear on some contact points inside the shelter.•Two positions inside the shelter were considered in this study: lying down and crawling position.•The conductive fabric used to make the tested shelter acts as an equipotential surface reducing the risk of lightning ground currents. Protecting people from the effects of lightning with portable shelters made of lightweight and easily transportable materials is a challenge that seeks to reduce the risk posed by lightning currents and improve the safety of people exposed to them. We describe laboratory tests conducted on an A-frame survival lightning shelter prototype constructed using an electrically conductive textile. To estimate the injected energy that a human body inside the shelter would withstand when lightning currents flow through the ground, it was developed and used a dummy. Voltages were measured and recorded on the dummy between both hands, hands to knee, and head to feet for two basic positions: in crawling position and lying down. The estimated energy on the dummy inside the shelter was less than 1 joule, when lightning currents up to 10 kA, related to non-direct strikes, circulating through the ground were simulated. Since ground currents are the cause of most lightning fatalities, our findings suggest that the proposed shelter strategy can help protect people's lives when they are inside, thereby significantly mitigating the overall risk of injury from lightning strikes. [Display omitted]