Lightning Surge Protection Devices Is The Best Defence Against Lightning
With every upgrade in technology, sensitive systems like dynamic positioning, drilling instrumentation and control, and other rig management systems essential to staying online are becoming more vulnerable. From the standpoint of electronics, the secondary effects of lightning — earth current transients and atmospheric transients, ground potential rise, and electromagnetic pulse — are a greater problem than the direct lightning strike. In some cases, the damage caused by lightning may not show up immediately after a storm but sometime later. What is surge? Cloud-to-ground lightning bolts are a common phenomenon—about 100 strike Earth's surface every single second—yet their power is extraordinary. Each bolt can contain up to one billion volts of electricity. Peak current intensity is of the order of 10 to 100 million volts of electricity, with an average of about 30,000 amps. Energy goes into light and heat with temperatures about 54,000 degrees Fahrenheit, six times hotter tha