Friday, November 16, 2007

Zap!!! The EMP Strikes Back (and featuring the return of the Shelby GT500)

So... here is the deal, cops might try to use a contraption which delivers a powerful electromagnetic pulse that disables the electronic systems running in a criminal's car and (hopefully) brings said criminal from 200 mph to a coasting, slightly impotent halt. So... apart from the immediate problem.. what if the EMP zaps the electronic steering and not the engine... then you have a car chase turning into a Michael Bay production on the I94...... well, what about shielding?

http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/19699/?a=f

The skin depth for microwave radiation is about 0.8 um for Aluminium. That means that an EM pulse at 10GHz will decrease to 1/e of its original amplitude within 0.8 micrometers of an Al sheet. So, painting the interior of the car, or just the housing for the CPU with a 4 um think Al coating will do the trick. Incidentally, this was seen during Broken Arrow where a powerful EM Pulse generated by exploding a nuke underground zaps a helo out of the sky. Radical.

No comments: