: IISc computational model to help protect aircraft from lightning strikes #IndiaNEWS #Technology Bengaluru, Feb 24 (IANS) Researchers at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) have developed a unique

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IISc computational model to help protect aircraft from lightning strikes #IndiaNEWS #Technology
Bengaluru, Feb 24 (IANS) Researchers at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) have developed a unique computational model to simulate how lightning can strike an aircraft.
The insights they have gleaned from this model can help design better lightning protective measures for aircraft.
While lightning strikes can be dangerous for aircraft, studying this phenomenon in the field is quite difficult.
Lightning strikes can damage the aircraft surface, lead to temporary disruptions in electrical and electronic systems or even cause permanent damage, and in extreme cases, cause ignition of the fuel-air mixture around the engine, leading to an explosion, an IISc release stated.
Usually, an aircraft gets struck by lightning once every 1,000 hours, says Udaya Kumar, Professor at the Department of Electrical Engineering, IISc, whose lab has been investigating this phenomenon in recent years. There have been a lot of incidents in the last century where things have been very catastrophic.
The first step in protecting aircraft from lightning is identifying the most common regions on the aircraft where lightning can attach or hit. Kumar and his team realised that current approaches to this identification were grossly oversimplified, and set out to develop a more comprehensive computational model. The model and the data obtained from it have been published in Atmosphere.
Kumars lab has been studying lightning protection for the past few years. In previous studies, his team has analysed the effectiveness of lightning rods in safeguarding tall buildings in a thunderstorm. They have developed unique models that have addressed several long-standing issues of lightning current evolution. In the past, he was also involved in the design of a lightning protective system for Indian satellite launch pads and has conducted research on different protective schemes. In the current study as well as in ongoing work, they have focused on modelling how lightning impacts aircraft, in order to develop suitable protective measures.
In the usual downward cloud-to-ground lightning, leaders precursors to lightning arcs are initiated at the cloud, which propagate towards the ground. However, field data, as well as the model developed, clearly show that in more than 90 per cent of the cases, the leader discharges are initiated at the aircraft. The model developed by the IISc team is applied to two different aircraft geometries: a DC10 passenger aircraft and the SDM fighter aircraft model. It involves extensive computation of the electric field around the aircraft and suitable modelling of the electrical discharges.
With the model, the scientists were able to obtain estimates of the minimum ambient electric field required for initiation of lightning leader discharges from the aircraft.

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