In addition to the painful sensation at the fingertips, many people at this moment begin to experience an unpleasant trembling throughout their entire body.
Imagine that you are not a simple car owner, but a taxi driver. In this case, your passenger is a pensioner with a pacemaker.
Although experts assure that such a discharge is not capable of killing or causing significant harm to health, it is still not worth testing this in practice with a sick person.
Electrostatic charge hazard
For many car owners, this becomes a real problem to such an extent that when leaving the car, they lower the sleeves of their sweater or shirt, and only in this way, protecting the exposed parts of their hands, close the door.
We cannot put up with all this and we need to look for solutions. And to find them, you first need to understand the cause of static electricity.
In the vast majority of cases, this is precisely static, and not damage to electrical wires or their breakdown.
Such a discharge, of course, will not kill a healthy person, but if such a spark slips through electronic devices, it may well damage an expensive part.
Imagine if a breakdown occurs while refueling a car near an open gas tank flap?
So, in addition to unpleasant physical sensations, ignoring this problem sooner or later results in more serious consequences.
How to cope with the “illness”
Let's figure out how to get rid of the cause of the current:
- The best thing to do in such a situation is to visit a service station. This is especially necessary when static discharges are felt very strongly. In the workshop, the car will undergo diagnostics, during which it will be determined whether its electrical equipment is in order. Detected faults will be corrected.
- Application of antistatic strips. You may have seen heavy fuel tankers on the road. What immediately catches your eye is the steel chain attached to the body, in contact with the asphalt. This is how grounding works with heavyweight fuel trucks. You can do something similar, only more elegant. It is not necessary to hang a chain, but anyone can install special antistatic agents.
- You should start upholstering the interior of the car, be it a model of the domestic auto industry or a foreign car. The most economical solution is to purchase covers. However, you should inquire in advance about their antistatic properties.
And, of course, you should pay attention to the wardrobe. If possible, it is recommended to exclude from it things in which you most often feel a shock of static electricity.
- It is recommended to use special aerosols to humidify the air in the cabin.
Firstly, the action of this substance removes the static charge inside the car, or can completely negate the effect of “static”. Secondly, more humid air has a beneficial effect on the well-being of passengers and the driver of the car.
If all previous actions have not led to an improvement in the situation: the electrical circuits of the vehicle are in order, the style of clothing has been completely replaced, strips for neutralizing charge electricity and an aerosol are present, but from time to time a small click when interacting with the car makes you remember the laws of physics, there is one more thing means.
The reminder of this direction of science is not accidental. You can learn how to exit the cabin correctly in accordance with the rules of physics. First, after opening the door, you need to touch the iron part of the car, and then stand on the ground.
Causes of Static Electricity
So, what are the main reasons for the accumulation of static charge? There are only two of them.
Firstly, it may appear on the car body due to the friction of air flows while driving. Most often this happens on a dry, hot day.
It's like an experience from a school physics course with rubbing an ebonite stick.
Someone will ask a logical question - everything is clear with a stick, we rub it on a rag, but what does the car have to do with it? The fact is that in the air around us there is a huge amount of tiny particles.
It is against them that the “body” of the car rubs, gradually accumulating a charge. Here is a visual confirmation of the presence of a charge on the car.
See how the foil ball behaves inside the homemade antistatic keychain as it approaches the door.
A similar effect of charge accumulation is observed in strong winds. Moreover, your car doesn’t even need to move, it can calmly stand on the side of the road and still charge like a battery.
As mentioned above, this most often occurs in the hot summer. When the air humidity is more than 85%, the problem disappears by itself.
In this situation, when you come into contact with a door or other part of the car, you act as a conductor through which electricity flows from the body of your iron friend into the ground. Here all the “tzimes” goes to the first person to leave the car.
As some car enthusiasts joke, the best way to protect yourself in this case is to constantly drive with your mother-in-law and leave after her every time.
