Protection Methods for Lightning Strikes

Lightning by Alltec Corporation
Saturday May 19, 2007

The traditional passive Franklin-style lightning rod system simply seeks to offer a preferred point of strike and further direct the energy of a lightning strike harmlessly to the earth through a safe low impedance path. Whereas, both charge dissipation and early streamer emission (ESE) technology systems seek to actively defend an area on the earth’s surface by using the “upward streamer” aspect of every lightning “circuit” in two very different ways.

The charge dissipation, or charge redistribution, terminal uses numerous sharp metal electrodes to generate a rapidly dispersing corona of ions to lower induced surface charge, effectively delaying or mitigating the formation of a rising streamer. In contrast, an early streamer emission terminal actively uses the increase in ambient energy, which precedes a lightning strike, to initiate its own upward streamer earlier and stronger than would naturally occur. This ensures that the leader is attracted to a certain low impedance path to ground and causes the streamer to meet the leader much higher than the point of the ESE, thus, providing a larger area of protection. These modern technologies reflect today’s greater knowledge of the formation, generation, and termination of the truly beautiful and destructive phenomenon that is lightning.

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