Wind Turbines vs. Lightning: What Happens When a Wind Turbine Gets Struck? |
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What happens if a wind turbine gets struck by lightning?
You might be surprised to learn this is not rare. To wind turbines, ‘getting struck by lightning’ is less like bad luck and more like an inevitability. Wind turbines are so easy for lightning to hit that they’ve been captured attracting a bolt every three seconds during a storm. On average, each wind turbine blade gets struck 1-20 times each year, depending on how storm-prone the location. So how does a wind turbine take hundreds of bolts of lightning over its lifetime and stay standing? In this video we’re going to find out about the science of lightning strikes and the tricks engineers use to make sure getting struck by lightning is no big deal. And we’re going to find out what happens when they get it wrong. Thanks to lightning engineer Allen Hall from Weather Guard Lightning Tech for help with this video. Allen will be joining me for a livestream soon https://youtube.com/live/sq5qZzVPLTY so put all your burning (pun intended) questions in the comments or join us LIVE. Also big thanks to Tom Warner for his permission to use his amazing lightning footage. You can find more videos from Tom on his YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/@ztresearch/videos and find a wealth of information about lightning on his website: https://ztresearch.blog/aboutztresearch/ The Engineering with Rosie team is: Rosemary Barnes: presenter, producer, writer Kevin Irman: research, calculations, assistant editor Javi Diez: editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/javierdiezsuarez/?locale=en_US If you would like to help develop the Engineering with Rosie channel, you could consider joining the Patreon community, where there is a chat community (and Patreon-only Discord server) about topics covered in the videos and suggestions for future videos and production quality improvements. https://www.patreon.com/engineeringwithrosie Or for a one-off contribution you can support by buying a coffee ☕️ here — https://www.buymeacoffee.com/engwithrosie Bookmarks: 00:00 Intro 00:46 What exactly is lightning? 01:49 How does lightning ‘choose’ what to strike? 02:48 Wind turbine damage from lightning strikes 05:55 Wind Turbine Lightning Protection System 07:30 Why the LPS is not foolproof 08:30 Lab-scale Tests and how lightning attaches 10:29 Certification vs Reality 11:15 Other causes of LPS failures 12:52 Limited testing period 13:55 Outro Sources: Upward Lightning at the Willow Creek Windfarm, Dashcam, 2023-06-23 Tom Warner https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3FLaGxqkdjs Where lightning hit the most in the U.S. in 2021 Kasha Patel and Hannah Dormido https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2022/01/08/lightning-strikes-most-us-2021/ Study on Lightning Protection Methods for Wind Turbine Blades Naka et al., 2005 https://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/ieejpes/125/10/125_10_993/_article Lightning protection of wind turbine generation systems Yokoyama et al., 2011 https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/6111051 Numerical tools for lightning protection of wind turbines Madsen et al., 2013 https://backend.orbit.dtu.dk/ws/portalfiles/portal/59237426/MADSEN_SEA13-2_Numerical+modeling+V1_0.pdf |