Journal of Lightning Research

2009, 1 : 1-8
Published online 2009 April 03. DOI: 10.2174/1652803400901010001
Publisher ID: JLR-1-1

Study on the Effectiveness of Single Lightning Rods by a Fractal Approach

Xuewei Zhang , Lin Dong , Jinliang He , Shuiming Chen and Rong Zeng
State Key Lab of Power Systems, Department of Electrical Engineering, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China.

ABSTRACT

Lightning rod is widely used in lightning protection systems. It is of practical interest to analyze the protective performance of a lightning rod taking into consideration some stochastic behaviors of the lightning process. The effectiveness of a single lightning rod is investigated in this paper using a fractal growth approach based on dielectric breakdwon model (DBM). The effective interception area, the strike distribution on rod and the protection zone of single lightning rods of various heights are calculated. Comparing our results with those of the rolling sphere method, it is shown that, the fractal approach is able to make reasonable evaluation of the lightning protective performance. New features such as the inherent vulnerability of the rod to lateral strikes and the division of the protection zone into three regions are also presented.

Keywords:

Lightning rod, fractal simulation, interception area.