Webinar «Lightning and Lightning Protection at Krzhizhanovsky Power Engineering Institute», page 1

The twelfth event from the series "Grounding and lightning protection: questions and problems arising in the design"

The first studies of lightning and the development of protection methods began more than 250 years ago. Despite this, modern lightning protection still has many questions that have not been answered.

Eduard Meerovich shared the information about the history of lightning protection development in Russia and in the world, interesting facts from this history, unique experiments with lightning, world records in physics, and also he told about the types of modern lightning protection systems and how they work. The video lecture has an informational nature and will be interesting and useful for designers, electrical engineers, research workers, students of technical departments and anyone who is somehow connected with lightning protection and grounding.

Navigation through the video lecture:

• The first scientific study of lightning, timecode 00:03:02
• (Middle of XVIII th century, studies by Benjamin Franklin and the feedback of Mikhail Lomonosov to these studies)
• The beginning of studies on the physics of long sparks, timecode 00:06:10
• (late IXXth - early XXth century, the theory of avalanches by John Sealy Edward Townsend; the question of how the long spark channel had been developing from the cloud to the ground.)
• Studies of long spark physics in the USSR, timecode 00:07:55
• (1930s, Gleb Krzhizhanovsky initiated the study of long spark physics; research by Ilya Samuilovich Stekolnikov, the discovery of the long spark leader)
• Experiments by Vadim Komelkov, timecode 00:12:51
• (Long spark studies, an unexpected business trip)
• Work of the laboratory during war and after the war, timecode  00:17:52
• (Lightning research during the World War II and after it; the creation of a surge overvoltage generator for 3 000 000 V; the era of the world records, the creation of a pulse oscillograph, the development of non-inductive cylindrical shunts, the pursuit of the most perfect records of the current leader; the creation of a Russian electronic-optical converter)
• The activities of the laboratory during the late 1950s - 1960s, timecode 00:24:02
• (the period when Eduard Bazelyan joined Kzhyzhanovsky Institute, a new level of the laboratory's operations, lightning simulation, studying the dependence of the result on the voltage pulse front)
• The leader mechanism of a spark and lightning, timecode 00:35:35
• About the role of the streamer zone and the case of a space charge, timecode 00:37:02
• The elementary leader theory, timecode 00:38:58
• The history of appearing of the Russian protection zones, timecode 00:40:05
• Lightning path, timecode 00:42:17
• (which way will the lightning strike take - a short or a long one? Development of the statistical method by Krzhyzhanovsky's Institute (Electrical Institute)
• The methodical basis of the calculation of the number of lightning strikes into overhead lines, timecode 00:45:41
• Registration of the lightning strikes to the Ostankino TV tower, timecode 00:47:06
• Possibilities of the Krzhyzhanovsky's Institute (Electrical Institute) statistical method and its application, timecode 00:48:23
• Studies of the lightning corona by Valery Popkov, timecode 00:52:14
• "Triggered lightning" experiment, timecode 00:55:33
• (about the charge cloud)
• Study of the corona discharge in an electric field of a thundercloud, timecode 00:55:33
• The application of corona discharge studies, timecode 1:01:10
• (about dissipation array systems that prevent the formation of a counter-leader and, consequently, a direct lightning strike to a facility)
• What active lightning protection actually does, timecode 1:06:50
• Lightning protection grounding, timecode 1:10:39
• (about electrical fields and the behavior of the lightning current in the ground)
• Collaboration between Krzhyzhanovsky's Institute, High Temperatures Institute of RAS and RF SRC TRINITY, timecode 01:14:07
• (About the creation of a surge generator with a voltage of 2 mV and an energy of 4 MJ, as well as studies carried out using this generator)
• Closing words, timecode 1:19:08
• (Conference on lightning protection, regulatory documents and important tasks of lightning protection, well-wishing to the younger generation of researchers)

Webinar text. Page 1

Quick navigation through slides:

Estimated reading time: 60 minutes

– And first, Mikhail Lomonosov who was excited with the Franklin's articles wrote the following: 

"When it turns, the Glass sphere strikes and flashes, 
Which is similar to the thunder.
And my mind was intrigued with this similarity, but I did not see enough power, 
So I was in doubt until the last summer".

Look at how Lomonosov approached the concepts of spark and lightning. He could see that the scales were different and that scale-up is required in this case. For this reason, he wrote a series of articles about scale-up. 

– What did it begin with? It began with the long spark physics in the beginning of the 20th century when an Englishman Townsend created his avalanche theory and showed that the non-conductive air turns into the conductive spark due to the avalanche-like reproduction of electrons. However, according to the experiments conducted by Townsend for this purpose, a significant electrical field is required for this. The electrical field of about 3 million V/m. But such field never existed between the cloud and the earth.

—– These works were guided by a young scientist. He was only 31 then. Ilya Stekolnikov. By that time, Stekolnikov has managed to graduate from the Power Faculty of the Moscow Higher Technical College, has had the internship in England and Germany, where very serious research dedicated to long sparks conducted. He mastered the experimental technique of that time and could discover the phenomenon that nobody observed before him. He saw a long spark channel in the laboratory. He called this channel a trace after the lightning channel, a leader of a long spark, and started a heavy struggle for the priority with an English specialist Allibone, who did the same using the same methods and equipment at same time. This struggle took about 30 years. It was completely unreconcilable at that time. It was ongoing when I joined the laboratory. It was Allibone who gave up, not Stekolnikov. In his milestone lecture he said, that this phenomenon was discovered by Ilya Stekolnikov in the USSR using the same methods and the same device, and that their works were completely independent. And he confirmed the authority and the priority of Stekolnikov as much as he acknowledges Allibone’s. It was like this. By the end of 1970s, Allibon could visit the Soviet Union. But he could not see Stekolnikov because he died in 1969. He met us, his students. We talked about all this work. And they were included in the classical studies of the long spark lightning.

You can see Stekolnikov here, on this photo.

– Immediately after the end of the war, the laboratory received a task near the Nikitskiye Gates. It was a Church of the Great Ascension. According to the legend, Pushkin and Natalya Goncharova got married there. But in fact, they got married in a different church. This church was built in 1858, and the marriage was in 1832, as you remember. But the church was built like many other Russian churches. An old church that stood there and where Natalya Goncharova and Pushkin got actually married, became one of its chapels. And in this church that is 36 meters high, a pulse voltage generator for 3 million volts was constructed from the Russian materials. This generator was installed upside down. It was installed not on the earth but its earthed end was installed underneath the church dome. And the entire generator was lowered down to the height of about 11 meters above the ground level and allowed to conduct experiments in this building, which were of the world-class level then. The end of the 1950s was a period of world records in the laboratory of high-voltage discharges of the Krzhizhanovsky Energy Institute. You know, each experiment of that time was literally an experiment that claimed for the record into the Guiness Book of World Records. Young Alexander Yankov made a modern pulse oscillograph on the basis of the first Russian electron-beam (double-beam) tube, which allowed for the recording of fractions of a microsecond and using this oscillograph during the long spark recording. Concurrently, the laboratory studied the non-inductive cylindrical shunts and the search for the perfect records of the leader current was started by a single woman working with a long spark, Inna Pulavskaya. She is still alive. At that time, she was young and beautiful. The journalists that came to the laboratory started their stories with the following words: "A slim girl drumming with her heels on the floor, approached... (and further according to the text)". We even tweaked her for these words. At that time, Evgeny Braga, No. 1 in the well-known group of eight called "Soviet Wings" that won the Heinlein regatta at that time and that was filmed in the movie that is still famous, "Royal Regatta", made the first Russian electron-optical converter with a continuous image scan. After some time, it will be a converter with the light enhancer that allowed for the results that could not be achieved by anyone else in the world. It was another flow of world records. And the situation was as follows.

He engaged the most experienced researcher of that time, Evgeny Braga, so that Braga would do this work for him. Braga considered such work to be beneath his dignity, and he had reasons for that, so he called the most low-skilled person in the laboratory, and it was me. By that time, I had made a lot of mistakes in the laboratory, and therefore Braga noted: "Will you be able to do at least such a simple thing?" And I tried to do it. We supposed that in the 3-meter long gap to be studied, the electrical strength should be around 1.5 million volts. We made a circuit, set up the oscillographic records, received oscillograms. We interpreted them the next day and saw that it was less than a million. I spit out an oath and went to the laboratory to repeat. After that I obtained the same value and went to Braga apologetically. He took me by the collar as he was a big man. And said: "Let's go, I will teach you how to measure". He measured and obtained the same 12 kV. And after that, the rush job started in the laboratory. We worked days and nights. By the beginning of 1960, an article was sent to the journal "Reports of the Academy of Sciences", which was almost like the European "Nature" then. And the article said that within the range of several hundreds of microseconds, the electrical strength of the air is dramatically reduced, and it occurs the stronger, the longer the gap wherein such measurements are made.

– In this chart, the red lines. The red line shows how the electrical field is changed near the earth surface when the lightning channel approaches the earth. All major events happen here when the channel is located at the distance of several hundred meters from the earth. And here, this electrical field increases during several hundreds of microseconds. These are the hundreds of microseconds when an electrical strength drop was observed in the high-voltage discharge laboratory. And then it became clear: likely there is no sense in following the lightning behavior by modelling it with the short front pulses. We have to model using the pulses with the longer fronts. And when these experiments began, we saw that the spark behavior with the shallow fronts which match the real-life lightning were completely different. We created a special technique, through which such research could be conducted. 

– There is plenty of energy in the electrical field. But it turns out that such growing channel as the leader channel cannot take the energy from the electrical field that is more than its own capacity. 

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