Donetsk, Oct 25 – DAN. DPR scientists are looking at opportunities to use Kirlian photography for wider industrial purposes, the Ministry of Industry said.

"In the old days people saw lights - Saint Elmo's fire on ships' masts and other objects. Now everyone knows there is a thermal field around human body and it can be measured with a thermometer."

One of the scientists, Candidate of Sciences, Docent of the Donbass National Technical University, Secretary of the Donbass branch of the Russian Cosmic Society Sergey Dzhura said that a Soviet scientist Semen Kirlian had discovered back in 1949 a method to capture the phenomenon of radiation around objects in a high-voltage environment. Later Konstantin Korotkov developed a technique similar to Kirlian photography called "gas discharge visualization" (GDV).

The Ministry said that the GDV method can be used to measure various technical parameters of metals, locate short circuits in power lines, prevent explosions in mines. It can also be applied in agriculture, criminology and medicine.

Kirlian photography is a photographic technique used to capture electrical coronal discharges. It is a plasma-fluorescence of an electrical discharge on surface of objects placed in a high-voltage field. The resulting surface tension between an electrode and the object reaches 5-30 kV. The effect is observed both wit organic and non-organic samples. *ot