Electromagnetic Measurement of Lightning Strikes to Aircraft

Abstract

Recent in-flight, direct-strike lightning research, using a NASA F-106B aircraft, is reviewed. An instrumentation system which records the rates of change of electric and magnetic flux density at several locations on the aircraft and rate of change of strike current to the boom is described. The measurement parameters are the rate of change of electric flux density over a range of 50 A/m 2 , rate of change of magnetic flux density over a range of 20,000 T/s, and rate of change of strike current over a range of 100 kA/>s. The isolated and shielded instrumentation system employs high-sample-rate digital transient recorders with augmented memory capacity and a wide-band analog recorder for data acquisition and recording. The data obtained during the 1980 flight test program are presented, and the data significance is discussed.

Modeling of Bi-Polar Leader Inception and Propagation from Flying Aircraft Prior to a Lightning Strike

“…• If Q str ≥ 0.8 µC [19], the pilot system starts from the boundary of the negative streamer followed by inception of space leaders. • Space leaders are represented with horizontal lines (zero leader gradient [40]) in strn ) are computed from the area between the potential distributions as shown in Equation (6). Subse-quently, the incremental space leader lengths (∆l…”

“…Several in-flight measurement programs have provided insight into the phenomena associated with a lightning strike on aircraft. NASA's Storm Hazard Program (F-106B aircraft, 1978-1986) [4][5][6], USAF/FAA Lighting Characterization program (CV-580 aircraft, 1984-1987) [7,8], ONERA/CEV Transall Program (C-160 aircraft, 1984, 1988) [9,10], and most recently the EXAEDRE project (Falcon 20 aircraft, 2016-2019, France) [11] are the major programs which were conducted to gather data on lightning strike. In all these programs, instrumented aircraft have been flown intentionally in and around the thundercloud to record the electric field and currents at selected locations preceding to and during the lighting strikes.…”

Fabrication and absolute calibration of B-dot probe for magnetic field measurement on a high power laser facility

“…where N stands for turn number, S stands for area of the coil, and V(t) stands for the voltage inducted in the coil. B-dot is not only used on laser facilities but also widely used in other scientific researches, such as plasma devices [11], accelerators [12], railguns [13] and aircrafts [14], because of its simple structure, clear physical principle, small size and low cost. In this paper, the fabrication and absolute calibration of B-dot at the Shenguang-II laser facility [15] is presented.…”

A new electric dipole model for lightning-aircraft electrodynamics

“…For the C-130 aircraft, a peak magnitude of 53 kA was observed at the cockpit when the current was injected at the nose of the aircraft and exited the tail (Perala et al, 1982). Several flight-test programs were held for obtaining experimental data to interpret aircraft-lightning interaction (Pitts et al, 1981;Pitts and Thomas, 1980;Baum, 1980). The SAE AE4L Committee (1978) in its report titled Lightning Test Waveforms and Techniques for Aerospace Vehicles and Hardware specified the idealized waveforms' component of current and potential for qualification tests (Clifford et al, 1982).…”

“…For the C-130 aircraft, a peak magnitude of 53 kA was observed at the cockpit when the current was injected at the nose of the aircraft and exited the tail (Perala et al, 1982). Several flight-test programs were held for obtaining experimental data to interpret aircraft-lightning interaction (Pitts et al, 1981;Pitts and Thomas, 1980;Baum, 1980).…”