JIM5.0

I don't know if I am posting in the correct place as I am still relatively new to MF, but I was wondering if it is possible to protect your car's ECU, radio, and other electronics from EMP?

We all remember what happened to Canada like 10 years ago. Solar flares (CME) let out a rather powerful discharge of EM energy such that when it hit the Earth's atmosphere in Canada, their electric grid when down and electricity was lost to millions of people. I do not know if electronics were fried too (TVs, radios, etc.)

Considering that EMP does not have to be created by a nuke attack, and it can come from the Sun or even geological discharge (from earthquakes for example, and you don't even have to be anywhere near ground zero), I sure would hate for my car to have its loads of electronics fried (ECU, radio, and all the other electronic gadgets in every car today).

If anyone knows how to shield, upgrade, or fortify the electronics against EMP, do tell.
I know CME and geological discharges are 9 times out of 10 harmless, but you never know. And besides, some malicious folks can make EMP devices that do not rely on a nuclear bomb to create EMP energy waves.

08Steeda

You can wrap your car in lead blankets! But short of that, there is no practical way to do it.

But I will ping my USAF Avionics buddies and ask them how they do it for fighters.

67mustang302

It can be designed into systems, and is often designed into military and industrial systems where your ground functions as a system shield....up to a point at least. But it has to be designed into the system. Trying to come behind it and add later usually is not very effective.

JIM5.0

I know military vehicles and aircraft are fully EMP shielded; they need to be., Imagine when they were doing thermo-nuke testing at Bikini Atoll post WW2\; the B29s dropped megaton rated nukes; and if they were not EMP shielded, they would have had some serious problems.

Likewise, modern warplanes have to be EMP shielded, imagine a B52, whose mission was to drop nukes, were not EMP shielded. Bad news for a warplane that is supposed to return and be reused for more missions.

For our cars, there are now college kids who can make remote controlled toys that are literally rolling EMP discharging devices. So if you are driving down the road and one of these eggheads gets a bug to f*** up your car, all he has to do is drive his toy next to your car and BOOM! He sets off the EMP discharge and F*** ups your car doing $10000 or more in electrical damage.

JIM5.0

I am not an electrical engineer nor an electrician by any means. This ground functioning as the shield you mention, do you mean the chassis and body panels more or less is used to function as a Faraday cage around the vehicle?

08Steeda

I know in the case of WWII aircraft they actually had lead lined cases for the electronics and lead blankets for everything else deemed critical like crew compartments.

I am an Ex Air Force SERE - Survival Guy and we had Avionics guys talk about that stuff with the air crews. Seemed like gobbly gook to me.

The newer stuff is beyond me. I do know that DARPA has been experimenting with EMP weapons and also some techies for Police Agencies for stopping car chases too.

JIM5.0

I have seen the police version of the nerd egghead remote controlled EMP toy car. It actually is rocket fired from the squad car, the cop remote controls it under the bad guy's car, then it sets off an EMP charge to turn off the engine.
I think they call it "Road Patriot" kind of like a road missile.

If the bad guy has a pace maker, and he happens to live from the ordeal, does he have right to sue the cop for almost killing him? LOL

I am not afraid of cops misusing these EMP toys, I am more afraid of the nerd kid who makes his own and takes it out by the streets with the intent to f*** up your car; kind of a random act of vandalism.

67mustang302

In a shielded system instead of having a simple ground to protect the system from a short, the ground system has shielding around the circuits to protect it from outside electrical sources as well as internal shorts. It's like speaker wires for a stereo system, where the ground/shield wraps ground the wires to prevent outside signal from seeping into the wires, it gets absorbed by the shield wire instead. Some components in a car already are shielded....spiral wound plug wires for instance prevent EM signal from getting OUT of the plug wires....but more sensitive things like stereos and ECM's would still have to be shielded to prevent interference.

Shielding only lasts up to a point though. Once it's reached it's maximum current capacity the additional current looks for the next path of least resistance. Military grade shielding is obviously the highest capacity, but also very expensive. Modern industrial facilities and cars use shielding that's a lot less effective but much more affordable. They're only trying to shield what they're LIKELY to need shielding from, if at all. So it's just a matter of cost effectiveness. It's simply not feasible to shield a car from military EMP signal or some other massive EMP signal.

As far as automotive, it's a DC system like any other. So you have a + and a -, or in and out if you like. The shield would be an additional connection into the system at some point that provides a current pathway for additional energy from an outside source. Much like a fuse protects the system internally from too much energy, the shield functions as an additional - pathway, but rather than allowing the system circuit to complete and function normally, it just carries energy harmlessly(in theory) around the system, rather than through it. The - is typically referred to as the ground, but if you were to look at say electrical design drawings for ECM's etc you'd probably see many components that have a + wire on one end, a - wire on the other, and somewhere in there would be a loop drawn around the wire with a line that says "shield." Think of it like a lighting rod wrapped around an electrical system, just like a lighting rod in a building that carries a lighting bolt's energy through a separate circuit to ground to bypass the electrical in the building, so to a shield.

But ANY shield system has a limit, even military. You throw enough residual EM current at the shield system so it reaches it's max current load....the rest needs somewhere to go. The shield gets overloaded and the system being protected usually takes the hit next. That's why equipment that's protected from say lighting strikes, occasionally gets fried by an unusually powerful lighting strike. As far as the limit on something like a military aircraft, who knows. Aircraft electrical systems in general are engineered to insane standards, and have double redundancy. Milspec is even higher, and some of their shield systems or systems components I'm sure are classified, for good reason.

But then refineries and natural gas compressors weren't designed to fight in a high EM environment from nuclear weapons usage. Military equipment is.

MU71L4710N

you sound like a super paranoid shut-in. i would stop worrying yourself to death about your car getting emp'd... of all things to worry about happening to you or your car, its an EMP shockwave?

JD1969

Glad I am not the only one who was thinking this. OP, there are 10 million other, more likely things that could happen to your car than an EMP event. BTW I heard the tin foil hat really does work.