Experimental results using corona discharge to attempt to reproduce the Turin Shroud Image

¹ Department of Industrial Engineering, University of Padova, Padova, Italy
² Department of Electrical and Information Engineering Technical University of Bari, Bari, Italy
³ Department of Industrial Engineering University of Padova, Padova, Italy

^a e-mail: giulio.fanti@unipd.it
^b e-mail: francesco.lattarulo@poliba.it
^c e-mail: giancarlo.pesavento@unipd.it

Abstract

It is well known that the Turin Shroud (TS) body image is not reproducible with all its peculiar features, but a great number of attempts have been made to reproduce at the same time the macro- and micro-scale properties of the double (front and back) image of the human body impressed on the most important Relic of the Christianity. The authors are convinced that among these experiments, those performed using CD (Corona Discharge) allowed to reproduce the greatest number of similarities.

The experiments were performed in the high-voltage laboratory of the University of Padua where CD was used to produce human images using linen clothes enveloping a half-scale conductive manikin of a man postured in the same way as the TS Man.

The manikin was suspended from ground and connected through the feet to a 300-kV DC supply. The resulting CD produced a human image on the enveloping linen cloth after proper aging. Due to the draping configuration, the image showed various distortions of pseudo-cylindrical type.

The structure of the resulting electric field and the influence of the cover producing a partial barrier effect was studied together with the pseudo-cylindrical distortions that resulted less evident in the TS image. This information was used to study the enveloping configuration of the TS during the image formation