Streamer Delaying Lightning Rods

[weressl]

Jack,


Weress,

A concern I have is the client that wanted to use these said when they installed them in phases at a plant they watched the lightning strike frequency increase in the parts of the plant that didn't have them yet. Have you seen this?

Glad to hear I'm not the only one who thought the Dr. was a little biased (although some of the comments I've heard led me to believe he has been involved in litigation on the subject and is probably just sensitive about the subject).

The 'displacement' of the lightning strikes were one of my concerns as well. The supplier gave an explanation that was logically sound. Later on when we proceeded with the installation our adjacent plant did not see increase of lighting incidents, nor did it experience decrease.

As Prof's Bazeleyan/Raizer/Alexander point out in their book attempts to sutdy 'lightning' in laboratory is rather foolhardy since you can't scale down lighting and hardly can create atmospheric conditions and varying soil resistance to scale. Conversly the mesurement of all the parameters of all components involving a lightning strike in the field is impossible. The issue is similar to any other weather fenomena monitioring with added difficulties. Measuring the influential parameters with sufficient area coverage and feeding it into a supercomputer will give you SOME data, but just as the recent hurricane showdown proves that weather predicition is far from accurate science. None of the models were able to predict the weakening as it actually occured.

The good "dr." is not only biased, but unwilling or incapabale of engaging in an honest open discussion to explore differing points of views, to review additional data or even to allow such to be conducted on the 'discussion forum' that he moderates. He has a job to protect as I understand.

 

[weressl]

Jack,

You obviously didn't read my posts, Dr. Mousa's papers (which you cited) actually cite evidence that in some cases these work (although with no proven explanation of why). He also side steps the lack of proof by bringing in an economic argument in the "Validity of the Lightning Elimination Claim" paper you cited. The problem as I understand it is no one has proof one way or another, can you cite one study that shows these don't work? (Note I said study note paper based on unproven theory)

Second the devices I spoke of do dissipate the energy in the same manner a traditional franklin rod, so unless the end does affect it's attractiveness to lightning they will work (they are installed the same as your traditional rods with down comers and interconnections otherwise the vendor would lose the UL approval, incidently they provide the design and except for the tops of the rods they are exactly the same as what I would have designed using traditional rods).

I have a problem with BOTH sides of this argument because neither has shown me conclusive proof that these do or do not work. Until I see proof and not just conjecture I will let the client decide if they want to pay a premium for the technology. (although the economic argument is a strong one for not using these, some clients have had too many problems with traditional systems and are willing to spend the money)

I agree with your viewpoint. Furthermore Prof. Em. Moore pointed also to the above and if one can read between the lines he was suggesting that whatever creates the slight difference between single point Franklin rod and the DAS system in the cited MMM tests is UNKNOWN. Mind you that the 'test' was set up without cooperation from the DAS manufacturer nor was it based in a design by them, so it was violating 50% of the basic claim by the manufacturer that speaks of a uniquely designed system for each application. In other words why would a University embark on a study WITHOUT assistance from the manufacturer? Were they afraid of the help? What were they afraid of? The results? Curious.........

I also suggest of asking for the explanation of the Hitachi laboratory experiement where the same applied voltage would result in a strike where the DAS only exhibits the 'Saint Elmo Fire', but never an arc.