HR: 0830h
AN: AE11A-03    [Abstracts]
TI: Modern Protection Against Lightning Strikes
AU: * Moore, C
EM: moore@nmt.edu
AF: Langmuir Laboratory, New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology, Socorro, NM 87801 United States
AB: The application of science to provide protection against lightning strikes began around 1750 when Benjamin Franklin who invented the lightning rod in an effort to discharge thunderclouds. Instead of preventing lightning as he expected, his rods have been quite successful as strike receptors, intercepting cloud-to ground discharges and conducting them to Earth without damage to the structures on which they are mounted. In the years since Franklin's invention there has been little attention paid to the rod configuration that best serves as a strike receptor but Franklin's original ideas continue to be rediscovered and promoted. Recent measurements of the responses of variously configured rods to nearby strikes indicate that sharp-tipped rods are not the optimum configuration to serve as strike receptors since the ionization of the air around their tips limits the strength of the local electric fields created by an approaching lightning leader. In these experiments, fourteen blunt-tipped rods exposed in strike-reception competitions with nearby sharp-tipped rods were struck by lightning but none of the sharp-tipped rods were struck.
DE: 0320 Cloud physics and chemistry
SC: Atmospheric and Space Electricity [AE]
MN: 2005 Joint Assembly