Bulletin of the American Physical Society
Four Corners Section 2022 Meeting
Volume 67, Number 14
Friday–Saturday, October 14–15, 2022; Albuquerque, New Mexico
Session A01: Plenary I
8:30 AM–9:30 AM,
Friday, October 14, 2022
UNM
Room: PAIS 1100
Chair: David Dunlap, University of New Mexico
Abstract: A01.00001 : Lightning Interferometry, attachment, and wind energy*
8:30 AM–9:00 AM
Presenter:
Richard G Sonnenfeld
(New Mexico Institute of Mining and Techn)
Authors:
Richard G Sonnenfeld
(New Mexico Institute of Mining and Techn)
Daniel P Jensen
(New Mexico Tech and Langmuir Lab)
Xuan-Min Shao
(Los Alamos National Laboratory)
Luis Contreras Vidal
(New Mexico Tech and Langmuir Lab)
Caitano da Silva
(New Mexico Tech and Langmuir Lab)
failure, and the number of strikes grows supra-linearly with wind turbine height and
rotor diameter. Despite relatively extensive studies of lightning strikes to tall
towers and aircraft, lightning "attachment" is not well understood. Most lightning
strikes begin with a streamer-leader system descending from a thundercloud.
Electric-field-driven streamers feed into higher-current leaders
and heat air to the point of thermal ionization. Prior to a strike, the high E from an
approaching leader causes structures to emit upward streamers (and radio
pulses). When upward streamers intercept the downward leader, a return stroke
occurs. Engineering models of this dynamic process are limited, and for wind-
turbines include wholly inadequate electrostatic field models to evaluate lightning
protection systems. In lightning rod studies, it was learned that a very sharp
point protects itself by creating a cloud of space charge which suppresses
upward streamer emissions. A moving wind turbine blade can outrun the space
charge (corona discharge) that it produces, making it even more vulnerable to lightning than
an equally tall stationary structure.
The suite of lightning research instrumentation has recently been enhanced by the three-dimensional
lightning interferometer. A lightning interferometer is effectively a small
radio telescope optimized to locate up to a million sources per second. Astronomers
measure right ascension and declination and have to infer range. A 3D-lightning
interferometer gets range intrinsically and can thus produce a full X, Y, Z
moving image of lightning flashes with resolution as high as five meters. We hope to
apply a 3D interferometer combined with high-speed video and current measurements
to gain insight into the process of lightning attachment to wind turbines and
further enable this crucial energy source while illuminating a basic question
of lightning science.
We acknowledge Prof. Ashok Ghosh and Sidharth Arunkumar for work on the attachment
problem in the prototype NM Tech spark lab. We thank Paul Clem of Sandia National Labs for helping
obtain funding for the spark lab.
*This work is funded in part by NSF grant #AGS-1917069 and the New Mexico Consortium at Los Alamos
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