by Allen | Dec 4, 2010 | Lightning Protection |
WXGuard is now on Facebook! Check out our Facebook page by clicking the Facebook icon in the lower right corner of this page. Join the WXGuard family and become a Facebook friend!
by Allen | Nov 24, 2010 | Lightning Protection |
Take a look at the terrific video of the San Francisco Bay Bridge during a thunderstorm. High voltage leaders that are several hundred feet long can be seen at the top of the bridge’s towers. The leaders glow when the a lightning strike occurs away from the bridge. The electric field created by the thunderstorm collapses and the charge stored in the leaders emit light. Really...
by Allen | Nov 22, 2010 | Lightning Protection |
Lightning strikes an oil storage container in Gardner, Kansas and does serious damage. Take a look at the following...
by Allen | Nov 13, 2010 | Lightning Protection |
Now that you know how to shrink coins with high voltage capacitors, here is a great high speed video showing the coin shrinking in a few microseconds. Watch...
by Allen | Oct 27, 2010 | Lightning Protection |
If you have a couple of high voltage capacitors laying around the garage you can shrink coins in your spare time. Delight the neighborhood kids, frighten their parents, and put yourself on a TSA list. Take a look at this video to see how it’s...
by Allen | Oct 25, 2010 | Lightning Protection |
Andy Plumer of Lightning Technologies provides a behind the scenes look at their high voltage test facility. The Marx generator is capable of producing over 2 million volts and can create high voltage sparks several meters long. The metal rings at the top of the blue generator prevent the generator from sparking to the ceiling. The tall thin white column is a voltage measuring device. In the following video there are several tests to a small aircraft model of a Boeing 747. The sparks are so quick that the video camera can barely capture them....
by Allen | Oct 18, 2010 | Lightning Protection |
Dr. Ian Cotton provides a guided tour of the University of Manchester high voltage facility. This is the largest university facility in the U.K. and is pretty advanced. This type of facility is used for high voltage testing of radomes and diverter strips along with power industry components. Everything in this lab works in hundreds of thousand of volts – more than enough to kill you. The flashover testing of high voltage insulators is really impressive....
by Allen | Oct 12, 2010 | Lightning Protection |
So, you would think that the metal bar (solid bar) diverters used on radomes are pretty much immune to lightning. They’ve been lightning tested, right? Well, they have been lightning tested. But testing can’t represent all the possible variations in lightning current. The following site shows the result of a lightning strike to an Airbus radome which dislodged the solid copper diverter. http://avherald.com/h?article=412b8215 If the bar comes off the radome it is pretty much a roulette game; red it flies by the aircraft, black it hits something important, like the pilot. Are there ways to keep the metal bars attached to the radome? Sure, you can increase the bar thickness until it has the cross-section of a Volkwagen and you can attach them with rivets left over from the Titanic. But that increases drag. And weight. And cost. The smart move is to use a WXGuard segmented diverter. Light weight, aerodynamic, and no fasteners to install. Call WXGuard at 1-800-543-5151 today for more...
by Allen | Oct 7, 2010 | Lightning Protection |
This video from the BBC shows a 200,000 Ampere lightning test to a piece of unprotected carbon fiber composite structure. Lightning guru Chris Jones of BAE Systems in Warton, U.K. provides the engineering commentary. As you will see, carbon fiber does conduct lightning currents but it doesn’t like it....
by Allen | Oct 5, 2010 | Lightning Protection |
What’s better than exploding watermelons with high voltage capacitors? Using a high speed camera to record it in slow motion. Take a look at this...
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