In this episode, we tackled positive vs negative lightning and the difference in destruction caused by each. We also talked about new research into scale testing of wind turbine blades, and the implications for properly lightning testing blades reaching enormous 100+ meter lengths.
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Transcript: Positive vs Negative Lightning
Dan: All right. Welcome back. This is the Uptime podcast. This is episode six. I’m your cohost Dan Blewett, and here on the Uptime podcast we talk about wind turbines, lightning protection, and everything renewable energy. I’m joined by my cohost, Allen Hall, lightning protection expert. Allen, how are you doing?
Allen: Hey, great. Dan, how are you?
Dan: Doing well, quarantine week, whatever. We don’t even know anymore. Where are we? What day is it? Is it nighttime? Is it daytime? What’s happening? It’s raining outside. So you can’t go outside today, but how’s, how’s your quarantine?
Allen: Uh, everybody is just, uh, quiet. Uh, I had a phone call today of all things from someone I haven’t talked to in quite a while, and he’s got, uh, three younger kids asked him how it was go with to have the kids home all the time.
And he says, well, yeah. It’s going. Um, yeah. It’s hard to explain it to younger children and the older ones know more about what’s happening and, and can kind of understand it. But the younger ones, I’m not sure if it’s just kind of overwhelming pleasure of not being at school, or is it just complete total boardroom?
So they probably actually bounce from one edge to the other on the boredom to excited scale all day. Uh, yeah. It’s gotta be hard.
Dan: Well, that’s the thing with summer vacation as a kid, I mean, you’re out of school and you’re so excited, but then you have lots of stuff to do. But then when August rolls around and you’re like running out of stuff to do, and you’re sitting at home and there’s no baseball games and your friends on vacation, you’re like, ah, I don’t like school, but I kind of want to go back.
And that’s gotta be everyone’s constant state right now. I mean, there’s only so much to do in your house, even though video games or you know. Much more prevalent they were when I was a kid at least.
Allen: Oh. And they probably make it a killing right now. Right. Video games are going to be a hot, hot, hot online video games.
It gotta be exploding just like Netflix and Amazon and all those video services and zoom. Right. So that the, the online presence has gotta be just huge right now and good for them, I guess. You know, at least they’re there for us.
Dan: Yeah. What was funny, we were talking about, uh, you know, some of the future of.
Travel and you know, autonomous vehicles and how it will allow us to travel so much faster. But at the same time, this quarantine has also really accelerated the technology of staying at home and doing stuff digitally and stop having so many meetings in person cause they’re superfluous. So you wonder if we’re almost going in opposite directions.
Like yeah, we could take an autonomous aircraft and five years to get to a meeting really fast, but let’s just do zoom because.
Allen: It’s easier. Yeah.
Dan: So they’re almost fighting each other. But
Allen: I kind of wonder that. I wonder, cause I’ve done a number of zooming. I had done a number of zoom meetings before this, this, this happened, and obviously now I do them all on, on zoom.
We’ve been using zoom as our platform and it, at least with zoom, you kind of feel like it just, the way it’s set up, it’s, it’s simplistic, it’s easy to use. You can get on it, get off at it. So it’s not. A complex system. But um, it’s, it’s funny cause I thought that when we, when we did, uh, online video conferencing a year ago, it was hold meeting meaning over everybody’s off now it’s.
Kind of warm into meeting, talk about the stuff we would talk about if we were all there and have the meeting and then talk about the stuff. We would have talked about it in the hallway afterwards. Uh, yeah. In the zoom call. So the zooms, the zooms have changed too. So you’re getting, just get to know people again and instead of just being, just cut and dry, get on and get off.
It’s more social.
Dan: Yeah. So Facebook,
Allen: yeah. No, it’s not bad. We’ll take it.
Dan: Yeah. Do do what you can in these trying and these trying times, everyone’s fighting. Everyone’s like sarcastically saying these trying times, like that’s like something your grandma would say or your grandpa.
Allen: And they actually had trying times.
We don’t have trying times if this is, if this is as bad as it gets. Uh, this is nothing to what my grandparents went through. Yeah.
Dan: I was watching the, uh, the Ken burns documentary, the Roosevelt’s a little bit. I don’t watch much TV at all. My parents suggested it and I’m interested in. Getting to know some of the old presidents
Allen: in DC, you have to be interested.
Right?
Dan: Yeah. I do appreciate the history of where I live today. There’s a little bit of pride there and uh, yeah, so I mean, the Roosevelt’s thing was very cool. Obviously FDR, you know, was in charge during the great depression. Yeah, it just gives you some perspective. I mean, a lot of people are going to be out of work.
Like there’s a lot of very serious implications for our economy right now that are going to continue to get worse. Yeah. But when you go back in time and you look at the great depression where 20, 25% of people were unemployed and they’re lining up to get food rations
Allen: to eat,
Dan: very, very different. So thankful that we’re still on this, uh, this version of.
You know, economic depression versus that.
Allen: Oh yeah. I think I take this over the great depression. No doubt I’d taken over any world war, that’s for sure. Uh, it’s been an inconvenience and it’s going to be a financial hit to everybody. I don’t know who’s going to come out this on the, on the upside, but, um, if this is bad as it gets and we’re going to be okay.
Dan: Yeah, for sure. So today we’re going to talk about a little bit of research on some blade testing, some scale stuff with blades. Also going to talk a bunch about different types of lightening and the implications on wind turbines. So let’s talk a little bit about some of the footage. And so we were talking before the show started off off camera about how you, uh, back earlier in your career for the first time, saw some of these phenomenon that you only heard about it, like step leaders.
So. Yeah. Tom, Tom Warner was the one who’s kind of taken a lot of really slow motion video, like what you say was 103,000 frames per second, a
Allen: hundred thousand frames per second. I believe that’s what he’s taken video on. Yeah.
Dan: Yeah. So talk a little bit about that and, and what we’ve learned from some of the slow motion video.
Allen: Well because lightening happens so fast, it’s in, because it’s so bright, it’s very hard for the naked eye to actually see what’s happening and to pick out some of the precursors to the, the big flash that w that we normally see. And. Getting high speed video cameras to record digital cameras to record, uh, lightning strikes and some of the precursors to lighting and some of the electrical discharges that happened in the cloud before you see the lightning strike the ground or wherever it’s going to strike.
Uh, that was just not there. And, uh, Tom had done a good job of recording some of that so you can actually see the propagation of the lightning channels through the, through the sky. That if you’re working in an aircraft in an aircraft lightening protection, it’s a big help to think of it that way, to actually see how it moves and understand in this high speed video, the aircraft’s not moving very far, but how things are propagating and how they’re splitting and a case of negative discharged cloud to ground and how the branching occurs in a positive cloud to ground others.
Kind of one continuous channel, uh, that happens and you see it in the lab. And I used to work at lightning technologies and the light technologies, they have a very advanced high voltage lab. And so you can of, you do enough tests, you can actually start to see those. We used to photograph them with a UV lenses, and so we can actually see some of the electrical discharges a negative versus a positive and see the differences in that.
Um, but to see it in the sky was really revolutionary. I always, and it wasn’t just me that had noticed that, um, most of the aerospace aircraft, lightning protection people working at the time had seen it or discussed it. And, uh, it was really, really helpful because it just took the book reading you had done and sort of the still photographs you had seen from the 1927 thirties and put it into live action.
So it’s like seeing in the wizard of Oz for the first time, if you in color versus any other movie that didn’t have his black and white, it had no, no sound, you know, it was just that kind of revolution happened right then. It was just mind blowing. Well, when you’re going
Dan: on, you read about some of this stuff, like step leaders, you’re like, that doesn’t seem real.
That seems
Allen: like, why would it happen? Right?
Dan: Like zigzagging, making this weird pattern. It’s like looking, it’s like, that seems strange, but then when you see it on slow motion video, and we’ll put some links in the show notes, it’s fascinating watching these little creepy crawly flashes of electricity just scan through the sky and then they do the connect and then boom.
That bolt goes through it through and it’s just, it’s crazy.
Allen: It’s like, it’s like a great river, like a Mississippi or Ohio river and watch all the tributaries to it. It looks like that in the sky, even though you don’t see that because it’s such low light intensity and it’s sort of, a lot of times it’s just pulsing.
Uh, so you don’t, you’re, I don’t really pick it up. Uh, that’s what it looks like. So if you actually see a satellite view of the earth, you see where the rivers are running. That’s kind of what I’m negative. Lightning strike it looks like. Uh, so it has that sort of randomness to it. Like, uh, like water running down a Hill and finding the lowest.
Path to wherever it’s going to go. It’s very similar related. Sometimes the, the water channel will branch off because it sees, you know, a better place to go that way. And lightening just the same thing. And so you have to think of the air as going from non-conductive conductive, and it’s sort of random.
Uh, it’s like Plinko if you ever watched game shows we played Plinko it’s just like that.
Dan: Yeah. And it’s not always going. And like you’d expect the leader to, the step leaders would always be going kind of down like towards the target. But then you watch some of them. Taking a three 60 spin, like going back upwards slightly and then go.
What are you doing little step leader? Get like, get back on track, like where are you going add or something. But
Allen: yeah, the video from the Midwest, uh, in the summertime or springtime, uh, where they’ve had huge, the thunder storms are huge, huge. They go across States and lightening discharges getting actually run across States in the cloud.
And it’s just that sort of thing, like what is going on and why is it continuing to. To create this continual line of flashes and the satellites that we now have. I’m watching some of these lightning discharges are finding remarkable things that we never thought were possible. It’s incredible.
Dan: Yeah. So let’s talk a little bit about some of these, um, different types of lightening because they all have different implications on how much force is flowing through a wind turbine or a human if you’re out walking your dog on the wrong time or whatever.
Um, but let’s first talk about, uh, cloud of ground. So there’s negative and there’s positive, and what’s the difference in the implications
Allen: here? Uh, so if you think of a cloud, I’m gonna give you a very simplistic model because it’s actually a little more complex than this. Usually the, the lower portion of the cloud is negatively charged and the upper portions positively charged and the most, the lightening strikes you will see, uh, that negative charge is reaching out and traveling to ground.
And you see this sort of spiky looking, heavily branched, um, lightning flash. The first flash will be look like it’s all branchy and then the subsequence, you’ll see multiple flashes, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang. That’s a negative discharge. A negative cloud to ground strike. So it’s got that pulsing, flashing light thing going on and it has this sort of, uh, uh, branchy look to it when it first strikes positive, which tends to be a little higher up in the cloud.
Uh, discharge tends to be just one continuous reach out and hit the ground and bammo it just starts to. Pouring energy into that channel. Uh, so it is very little branching and positive and attitudes that the physics of electrons and atoms and all this stuff. But essentially, um, if you, if you do see a positive charge, and that’s the rare case, um.
Five 10% are positive versus the 90 ish percent. That’s your negative. Um, yeah, they’re, they’re, they’re totally different. But for the most part, when you do see a lightning strike and most places in the world, they’re going to be a negative cloud to ground strike only in some weird circumstances, sometimes in the Midwest, sometimes on the coastlines, whether it’s a storm warning rolling through the ocean.
Do you see a positive
Dan: discharge? Gotcha. And then obviously I remember, I kind of remember the day, not the day, but I remember being told as a kid that. No, lightning actually strikes upward. It’s just like a, that’s not true. Like it does strike from cloud to ground. It also goes ground to cloud. It goes both directions, but yeah.
Um, as far as the implications for, because we both seen some, some footage recently, which is intense of, you know, the lightening originating from. Uh, you know, wind turbines, especially because of how they’re the biggest feature on any given, uh, know piece of land. But, um, what’s the difference as far as the energy flowing through, you know, turbine blade?
Are they, is it not dangerous because it reaches out from. The turbine and then it goes up, or is it still the same, essentially the same applications for it?
Allen: It’s the same implications in terms of the energies involved, uh, when the wind turbines reach out to the sky. And the first time I saw a discussion about this was, I think it was in Spain, and it may have been Gamesa that, or a university associated with Gamesa that was doing some research.
There were. Uh, there was a discharge somewhere else down in, in, uh, on the edge of the storm. So it’s basically there’s a lightning discharge somewhere else, and then all of a sudden, all these wind turbines light up and they start reaching out to the sky, like, Whoa, what is, what is happening there? Uh, and then, uh, we’ve seen more recent video, uh, basically showing exactly the same thing.
If you think about the way charge is up in the sky, and when you remove some of that charge over, there’s a lightning discharge five miles down the road. While the storms are huge and a change in one part of the storm affects the rest of the storm, and. And things that are taught, like wind turbines, uh, all of a sudden can see this chart center right above them that they didn’t, there wasn’t there previously in the wind term to start to reach out and satisfy that and bring it to ground.
Uh, and the energies and those things are not small either. So you have to think of a thunderstorm as not just being this, uh. Pocket of charge. And once you dump it, it’s gone. It’s not that way. It’s a very, air is not a great conductor. And so different pockets of the thunderstorm will have different amounts of charge in them.
And as things move electrically, it changes and it changes very rapidly. And I think that’s one of the things that I first saw from that paper and Spain was. Uh, just the acknowledgement, like weird stuff’s happening and we’re taking lightning strikes. We didn’t think we were taking on wind turbines and we didn’t understand why.
Well, here’s a good reason that the wind turbine is actually reaching up into the clouds and triggering strikes after a strike has already occurred somewhere else.
Dan: That’s cool. And is there any technology that some that suppresses, like you hear of like lightening arresters, and is there anything that can suppress that or is it just, that’s just, it’s just going to happen.
Allen: Uh, that’s a good question. Uh, you see advertise quite often, and I’m not a huge proponent of this, but I’m not a naysayer either. It’s, it’s show me the data. Uh, but you’ll see these, these products where they say they’re discharging the cloud by basically attracting static charge out of the cloud. Quietly and slowly, so the charge can’t build up an oven.
So that tends to be leased. These kind of spiky things are stuck up in the sky and maybe there there’s something to them. I am not going to discount that. Uh, but can you, can you stop it from happening? I don’t think so. Um, obviously people would disagree with me and there are. More than willing to have.
Now I’m okay, let’s tear it. Uh, because the whole thing in a lightning protection senses, nobody wants to have lightning damage. And we all have our different ideas of how to prevent it. And, uh, my idea may be may work, may not work. Someone else, idea of may work, may not work. The proof is in the pudding.
Right? We have enough lightning strikes that happened in the world that we can test out these ideas and, and check them out. It’d be very similar to going through, like with the coven 19 right now, it’s almost the same thing except on a sort of medical sense where they’ve got a possible, a myriad of possible cures or vaccines or serums or whatever they may be.
And all of them have potential and you have to sort of run them through clinical trials, be very objective about it and say, is this working? It’s not working. Why? The same thing exists in any engineering field. Enlightening protection is one of those where you really see a lot of things, but you’re never sure if it’s working or not.
Uh, and, and, and my take on it, go through those same sort of experience. You need to prove that it’s working and, and maybe things that I, that, uh, that seem odd do work. That’s great. And because the goal is safer, more productive, uh, equipment and systems for, you know, advanced society, that’s what we’re all looking for.
Dan: Yeah. So everyone, if you’re out there listening, there’s enough lightening to go around. We can all,
Allen: don’t worry.
Dan: Don’t worry. You’re all coming quite lightening. You can all get your tests and
Allen: near you. Yes, it’s coming.
Dan: Yeah, no, that’s, that’s fair. And I, I’m sure it takes a lot of, a lot of data just to finally get to that point.
I mean, I know that there’s a lot of companies out there collecting that data. Hmm. Um, but it seems like a lot of them are playing it pretty close to the vest, and that seems almost like a problem. It’s not really getting out into the public, is that right?
Allen: Yeah, it’s close to the vest and there’s a lot of reasons for it.
Uh, I don’t, not sure any of them are extremely valid. Uh, it would be, I’m trying to think of a good example of what it’d be like. Like, let’s just say it’s a mouse trap, so everybody’s got a better mouse trap, right? That’s the whole thing. You need just building a better mouse trap. Sure. You’re a better mouse trap.
But there are, if I go to Walmart, God forbid that I go to a Walmart today, but if I went to a Walmart, I could probably find 10 different varieties of mouse trap. And some of them may work for my particular application and some of them won’t. That’s what happens in lightening protection too. Everybody’s got their own sort of mousetrap and they’re holding it as being the super effective against everything.
I D I just don’t buy into that. Not to say that the. Conceptually that that’s not right, but there’s never just one solution for everything. You know, you need to take consideration. Um, what part of the world you’re in, how much lightening energy is there? Are you on top of the mountain? You’re on the sea.
There’s a lot of variables that play into it and people don’t like sharing data also, which is the other thing. They don’t like to be held up to studies. Uh, it makes it hard. It makes it hard to be good judgment judges of it. And particularly in wind turbines. I think. Because, uh, it’s a ground-based thing.
Aircraft people see themselves differently and want to work on airplanes and they don’t want anything to do with sort of ground-based, they live in slightly different worlds. Aircraft people are also very, uh, protective of technology because it can mean. Uh, paycheck, uh, on the ground turbine, uh, ground and wind termin things.
It’s a little bit different because there’s so many people were involved with it. Uh, and they all have a basic, basic electrical lightning protection, uh, ideas and concepts, uh, from sort of the Franklin, Ben Franklin lightning rod, all the way up to the static dissipation devices, or triggering a lightning strikes with lasers or something of that sort.
Yeah. Uh. Is there, and I always go back to the same thing. It may work in your particular application. If you want to spread it out, you better do the testing and show it. And I will. Last week we talked about, um, applied philosophies, SLPs device. They went and tested it and they just went to the lab and said, hit it.
Let’s go see what it does. And they’ve also done, obviously they’ve done some testing on wind turbines and Navy able to just show that it does work. And you know, is it going to be the best fix for a lot of Gamesa wind turbines? It totally could be, but the proof’s gonna be in the pudding and they’re going to slowly and permit it and find out.
But. That’s the way engineering is, right? We just don’t put a man on the moon. You know? There’s a lot of rocket launches and a lot of flying airplanes before we put a man on the moon. We’re still in that stage with a lot of lightening protection.
Dan: Yeah, I know. It’s interesting. I’ve been looking up Tesla and they actually.
I’ve kind of like an open door policy with their patents, like they’ve shared a lot of their patents on battery technology and stuff like that. And, um, I don’t know. Do you think that’s something that could ever happen in this industry?
Allen: Uh, you know, I, did you watch that video with Elon Musk talking about the, just letting the patents go?
Did you ever see that? I’ve
Dan: seen his whole Rogan podcast and they might have mentioned it there. I know I’m aware of it, but I don’t know if I’ve, I’ve watched that. In its entirety that that segment you’re talking about,
Allen: because his thought was, Hey, we have this technology. If you hold a char ourselves, it’s not going to become universal enough to actually make a difference.
And, and so, and he’s right on. It’s, it’s also very Silicon Valley way of looking at patents, which is. They have zero value, um, besides paying some attorney to, to, uh, uh, you know, go on an trip, you know, just paying for their vacations. It doesn’t make a lot of sense in Silicon Valley because. Someone’s going to rip you off.
And by the time, so if, if I’m not saying this happens, but if Microsoft wanted to take your idea and use it, it’d be very hard to fight Microsoft and win. So from the Silicon Valley point of view, tends to be road, just going to push pushup with this product. We’re going to get two years out in front of anybody else and they’re going to have to acquire us.
And that’s okay. That’s my patent. My patent is, I have the company that had the technology and I have the name, I am Uber. Now beat me Microsoft. Right? And that’s, that’s the difference. And in the lightening world, we still create, if you go online, it’s easy to do with Google patents today. You can actually go check what the patents are and winter Robinson, you’ll, it’ll send you emails when they happen.
But. You can follow it into the wind tuber world. What you see is this patent patent, patent, patent, patent, patent, patent patent, and I don’t see a lot of those patents being implemented on the winter men’s, which is weird, uh, because if their idea is really good, they ought to be putting on the wind turbine.
Creighton patents for patent sake, I don’t sure helps the rest of the world. And in particularly in the wind turbine. It field where lightening is such a significant part of the downtime of a wind turbine and the damage and the expense of a wind turbine. Are you helping the industry by doing that? Is that making you a market leader because you have a slightly better lightening protection design than somebody else?
I doubt it. Right. And it makes the industry, um, uh, pier, uh, sort of in its early stages. It’s not, I mean, it’s a very developed industry. It’s a bit, and they’re making wind turbines what, eight, 10 megawatt wind to be at 12 megawatt fright. You know, Holly and swell. Yeah. So you have these big, huge machines and.
We’re still, we’re, we’re way past that sort of a techie Silicon Valley point. We need to be getting to, we need to be more ubiquitous. And, um, if you went when to be a role player longterm, you got to just get it into society more often. And the ELL mosque, Musk approach and others, I think Apple had that opinion for awhile.
I’m not sure they do that anymore, but it was just like, here’s the patents. You can go ahead and try and make this thing good luck to you and we’ll see you at the end. It’s probably a better play.
Dan: If I had those patents, I’d be making my own iPhones every day.
Allen: Are you going to make a Tesla car? Like maybe, maybe they are.
Maybe they’re having, maybe they make their own competition. They probably will do that. Uh, there are a number, I just know. Just because I’m in the industry. I know there’s a lot of electric car programs outside of the, sort of the normal and normal automotive companies, and Tesla, there a lot of other ones that are going on simultaneously.
Uh, and they probably use it in the Tesla patents to advance their product. So Tesla will have competition, but the more choices you have in. The more varieties of an electric car, um, the more likely that that whole industry becomes accepted and then they can take on, you know, Tesla can take on a GM at that point because they have the market share.
But until such time, Ford and GM and Chrysler and all the big automotive companies in the United States are just going to have their way.
Dan: Yeah, yeah. That’s fair. So let’s, let’s shift gears a little bit. So testing, so. We’ve talked about testing and other podcasts, but, uh, we’re talking about a research paper that was kind of comparing scale models to full-size.
And so what are the, what are some of the challenges there? And kind of tying in some of the different types of lightning, you know, with all the different types, you know, negative, positive, um, like all the different streamers upward downward. How can you, a, does the scale stuff, uh, work and B, how can we reproduce all these different.
Allen: Yeah. Okay. So there’s those two pieces that do, are we adequately recreating the lightening event in the laboratory and can we not use a hundred meter blade in the laboratory? Cause what are you going to do with a hundred meter blade?
Dan: Right?
Allen: You’re not going to write, you know, at that point you might have to just stick it out and see what happens out in real world and see what it does because there’s no facility that can handle it.
So what tends to happen is you usually. Uh, use a segment and basically they out or whatever, a couple of meters of a blade where the receptors are are the, are the thing you bring to the lightening lab. And the question always. Oh, and I agree with questioning this because it doesn’t make sense. If I take, uh, the outer say, let’s just say, just make it simple.
The outer 10 meters, which is 30 odd feet, if I take the outer 10 meters of a Winterton blade versus the other and leave off the other 90. Does it change what happens at the tip? Yes. Oh yeah. It will. It totally will. Because electric field intensity is going to be different, and the way it’s going to distribute is going to be different and yeah.
So you don’t get exactly the same response from a segment as you do on a larger blade. And there’s a paper, um, that came out recently, uh, from the university of Nottingham’s branch. And Malaysia walks through that, like they, they, and they use COMSOL, which is a computational program to compare the two, uh, to see, cause they were probably testing just the outer length of blade and then they had the full blade to see if they, if the laboratory results are gonna match, what.
Would really happen in, in the, in the world world. And the answer was no other offline, uh, you know, roughly 15, 20%. There’s a, there’s a, that’s a significant difference if you’re talking about whether our blade gets punctured or not, especially something that big, uh, a puncture on a 80 meter blade, it’s going to be.
Problem. It’s just a problem. And especially cause those types of blades tend to be in, in remote places like the ocean. So I’m getting the lightning test right, is going to be a really important aspect. And so, um, I think the same, I’ll give you the similar example cause I think this is exactly the same thing exists for airplanes, which is what they call model tests.
So on an aircraft, uh, early on in the design process, uh, the. You can determine where lighting me attached to an airplane by creating a model. And so let’s just say we got an Airbus 83 80 which is a gigantic airplane, and I got to shrink that down to, I don’t know, let’s say one 100th of the size. So I can get it into a place where I, and I can get it into the lab in the lighting lab and then do lightning strikes on it.
So the lighting, the electrical event is all scale. It’s, it’s, it’s one to one what’s happening in the outside world. But the airplane is roughly one 100th. Of the size. Are you getting the same result?
Dan: Yeah.
Allen: Copy. Yeah. You won’t. I, you want, with the competitional people all the time, uh, will poke at us and say, ah, that model test is.
Well, there’s also, the model test is garbage. Oh, okay. It’s not garbage. It’s telling us a lot about where lightning is gonna attach it. But I can push back the same thing computationally, like will computational having you just, it’s just a guess too, right? What are we putting the model? It gets pushed out the other end.
Is it right? Either. And the same thing is this in wind turbines? Um. Does there, and ultimately in all of this, the answer is you’re going to put it out in the field and you got to find out, you know, and then you, what you should be doing is learning from what your experiences in the field and like we just talked about with patents, who need to get that information back into the hands of engineers so they can make the next generation better across the board, across the board.
Dan: So what do we what, what would you be your suggestion then? So if we’re. We know there’s some limitations to testing and there’s probably no perfect solution. Um, what, where do you think we go?
Allen: Uh, that’s a really good question, man. You’re full of good questions.
Dan: Yeah. Stumped them.
Allen: Uh, here’s where my gut says it.
We’re getting good computationally. And we have more horsepower. I was just talking to my son about to do Mac pro a computer and how many processes does it have? Like, wow, there’s a lot of horsepower in a device that can sit underneath your desk today that would have taken a room full of computational power.
I think we’re going to get to the point that we’re going to be able to simulate a lot of lightening events on a computer. And now can we simulate the fine details yet? No, that’s where the problem lies. We can’t simulate fine details on a lot of the lightening punctures or fine detail problems. Uh, but we’re getting closer and closer and closer.
So the push is going to be in the computational side, um, because I don’t have to test a big blade. But at the same token, I gotta be watching. When I do put that blade in service, it’s gotta be watching because happening and putting that back into the model. The worst case is I do a model. I say it’s good.
I pushed a blade out the door and then I never go back and look at it. Oh, that’s not, that’s not engineering. You know? That’s just. That’s, that’s big as you’re just pulling up, pulling the handle on the slot machine and yeah, you may get a payout. You may not. Uh, that’s not engineering that the feedback is where engineering occurs.
And that’s, in my opinion, that’s the place where we’re probably the weakest, cause we have a lot of computational power, but I’m not sure the engineers are in touch always with what’s happening in the field. Well. So
Dan: is there any, uh, I mean like, do you have to test a blade with lightening originating coming.
Out through it and then back into it like you would, you know, from an upward strike to a downward strike. Like, do you have to do that or is that not really relevant in Tesla,
Allen: you’re sort of doing it because of the polarity. So in one aspect, the blade would be negatively charged. Another, another test is blades positively charged.
Um, and you see different, uh, it’s, think of it as you’re creating this, uh, cloud of charge above the blade in the lab. And then in this cloud of charge in the lab, is it basically. Typically a metal slab of some sort or, or better yet in the way that we do it on airplanes. And they started doing a blades more recently as actually take the blade in a crane and lifted off the floor.
It’s suspended over a flat, uh, metal sheet on the floor. And then you energize a Blaine let on record of floor. That’s seem to be a lot more realistic than some of the things I’ve seen. Some recent papers where. They have an electrode above a pointy electrode above a blade, a couple meter blade that’s sitting above the ground, that that configuration doesn’t make any sense to me.
What makes sense to me is you take the blade, you energize the blade because lightening is not running into the blade. The blade is actually written out and reach out to the space. So your PO possibly charge a blade, then you negativity charged blade, and you see what it does. Uh. One of the things I know from doing aircraft tests and rate them justice as you charge a blade the first time in the test, there’s charges left on the blade.
So the next test you’re gonna do is we’re going to have a slightly different result cause there’s charge already on the plastic, that fiberglass structure of the blade, and it had no place to go from the first test you did. So the second test, you want to give you sometimes a slightly different result and the third just be different.
If you change polarities. Got to wipe that out and restart. Uh. In the real world. And if you think about it in the real world, as a blade kind of spins, it’s kind of like coming up to the clouds. He’s the cloud charges up, it goes away, comes back up, charges that goes away. So by the time the lightning event does occur, there’s a lot of charge on a blade and things are not as electrically pure as we see in a model or in a test.
Dan: Gotcha. Well, that’s all very complex.
Allen: It’s totally complex. Right? And that’s like a,
Dan: Yeah, we should be able to solve quickly, but it just isn’t.
Allen: We haven’t done it. We haven’t done it yet. Just, there are plenty of drone companies like sky specs that are out there all the time looking to repair blades and inspect planes because again, punctured all the time.
So all the tests that we did and all the analysis we did, it hasn’t eliminated the problem. Uh. And hopefully, you know, the, the point of a company like sky specs is that they can start feeding that information back to the engineers directly and the engineers can then incorporate that in their next design and start eliminating some of the things.
That’s the goal, right? The goal is to keep these wind turbines and keep the wind terms moving and operating all the time. And as an industry, we need to get to that point. We got to get to that point. It’d be like buying a car that really ran. 200 miles and then you had to go in for a full tune-up. That’s no fun.
Right. You should, you know, once a year, give a quick tune up and get the car on the street on the road. Again, you can just can’t have random events knock on the turbine out of service. That’s not where we should be today.
Dan: Yeah, and then, I mean, are there other issues as far as, I mean, why can’t we have a little mini winds are when turbine farm that.
Is just used for testing. Is it just too cost prohibitive to do that? I mean, why does it have to be done inside of a warehouse inside of a lightning lab?
Allen: Simplicity. Yeah. Speed. They always test the wind turbines, so if they have a new. Blade design or, or new generator, they will actually make a prototype and put it out and install it in the main, put on a new tower and install it and run it and check it out. And it’d be like a new car or a new airplane.
They’re going to go through a series of tests and one of those is this a real world test? But they tend to been built one of them. Yeah. And then if it gets struck there, I’ve seen some reports, whether the development blade slash uh, wind turbine has gotten struck just. By happenstance, and they use that as justification of why the lightning protection system works great.
Now, that’s just to me, this, that’s not really engineering, it’s just anecdotal information. But, um. Should we be able to do it? I think it was, go back to the computational thing. We, we shouldn’t need to have a field full of physical winter bins. We should be able to do a computationally, we have the horsepower to do it.
Just do we have the willpower to grind it out and get better models so we can do it.
Dan: Yeah. Yeah. Makes sense. And is this something that, I mean, as engineering students finish their degrees, is this something where there’s enough. You know, academic power coming through up through the pipeline? I mean, is this something people want to study to advance this or does this have to be funded by private companies?
I mean, there’s a big company like Siemens. Can Mesa have to kind of push to get these computational models built
Allen: both. Now I will give you the difference between the United States and, um, the UK. For example, and maybe it’s just the different way that, uh, engineering programs are established, but in the United States, there’s not w where’s the high voltage program? I think Mississippi state still has a high voltage generator lab, a lightening lab, and a high voltage lab where undergrad students can get some exposure to it, but I don’t know of many others.
There there w if there are a bunch, I don’t know of them all. And Mississippi state. I believe that that’s the one that comes to mind. I think it’s Mississippi state. Uh, and the UK. Uh, the university of Manchester has a huge high voltage lab that it has undergrad students and graduate students in an all the time.
Uh, same thing for a Cardiff. They have a lightning lab. It’s sort of funded by Airbus, but they have a lightening lab there, and we’re undergrad students and graduate students can get hands on exposure to the lightening world in the U S it’s just not the same. You just don’t have those facilities in terms of PR.
And even in per capita, just Manchester and Cardiff having those two places in the UK, you would have to have 10 of those United States at least. And they just, we don’t, we just don’t. And so what happens. In the States is that you, you get hired on at accompany and you work with the previous lightening engineer and you learn as much as, as they’re willing to Dole out.
And then you, you have to just skit Atul and work hard and put your nose to the grindstone and learn as much as you can to go to Washington Charnel, Tom Warner videos and, uh, uh, read all the, you know. Um, all the things out of the, uh, out of Gainesville, Florida on lightening protection. Uh, you listen to someone like Andy plumber who has a ton of lightening knowledge, just roll around his head with the whole time.
It’s, it’s, it’s, um, it’s sort of old school and it isn’t, it’s not sort of old school. It is old school. It’s just passed down generation to generation. And, and I’m not sure that’s a great thing for the United States. Uh, it needs to be more of a. UK model where undergrads, students are getting some exposure to this stuff and we would have a lot less IP and we’d have a lot less lightening issues.
Um, we have a lot of kids going through school right now that know a lot about computers, and that’s great, but that has nothing to do with lightening protection in a sense.
Dan: So you’re saying, you’re saying Snapchat doesn’t carry over to lightning for the lightener production world?
Allen: No, and there’s, to think about it and try to baseball or sports is, there’s sort of a minor league system, which you sort of earn your, keep in a sense that if you, if you do well enough, you move to the next level.
It’s just like that in engineering still. Uh, and, but you’re just learning how it’d be like learning how to play baseball the first time when you reached a low level. A baseball. That’s just, this is crazy. You should come in with some skills that you don’t have skills as an engineer yet some fundamental skills, but you don’t have any specifics.
Goals are in specific to lightening because a lot of the lightening, uh, issues and having to do with the power distribution. Network in United States have been solved years ago, but the airplane one hasn’t always been solved. And, uh, the winter, winter one clearly hasn’t been solved. And there’s, there’s numerous other ones that haven’t been solved either.
Um, so our, our, uh, unwilling to us to, or are at the time thinking we’re not gonna have any more lightening issues and shut it all down. Back in the 1980s was shortsighted. And, uh, it’s, it’s put the United States, in my opinion, behind the curve a little bit. Some of the best papers on lightening protection come out of Europe.
Almost all of them do. There’s some good ones in United States, and there’s some really good ones in Japan right now. Some brilliant ones coming out of Japan. Uh, and China’s invested a lot in some lightening protection and high boldness labs where they have a bunch of students learning. So, you know, United States does, is not the leader in lightening protection right now.
I would not say that.
Dan: Gotcha. I was a, I wonder maybe as a Rite of passage, you know, in the police Academy, if you’re going to carry your mace, you have to be maced yourself. I feel like in the whitening industry, if you’re going to work in this field, you probably just need to run out into a, you know, into a storm and an open field and maybe wave a, a broomstick around and.
Take one for the team. So you really know. You really understand lightening, you
Allen: know? Well, I think,
Dan: no, I, fair only fair.
Allen: I wouldn’t say that this is factual. Okay. Uh, but it sounded like when general electric had their lighting lab down in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, that had some of those initiation things were happening.
Not that they would shock somebody, but they, uh. Yeah. Uh, no way to get into it too deep. But it sounds like there is some, some initiation going on there. Uh, so you kind of earn your keep. Um, uh, but yeah, I think that as, as time has changed and we’ve gotten more away and we’ve gotten more desk oriented and less, um, out in the lab oriented, we’ve lost a lot.
I th I think being out in the lab and doing those experiments and getting the physical world put into your head pays off dividends later on.
Dan: Yeah. Gotcha. Well, obviously the United States States can’t be the leader in everything, and if there’s good research coming out and it comes from Europe, so be it.
I mean, that’s a good thing for the industry, but yeah, it does seem like there’s a disconnect. Like maybe there’s just, like you said, not the pipeline that there should be. Yeah. With all the higher education here in the U S so
Allen: yeah, that’s true. Well, yeah.
Dan: Well, Alan, great episode today. Appreciate your insight as a, as per usual.
Yeah.
Allen: Thanks Dan. I appreciate you and I, I, you’ve been doing a great job on these podcasts.
Dan: Well, you know, just trying to keep up and, um, you know, maybe I will, it’s, it’s stormy out tonight. Maybe I’ll run out there and learn, learn a thing or two. There’s some good buildings I can scale. Just maybe hang out with the lightening rod for a little bit and, you know, see what I learn.
Maybe come back with a big, uh, big scar or something as it goes in and out. We’ll see.
Allen: I’d rather have you watch Tom Warner videos.
Dan: If I’m here next week, then I survived. You’ll be all on us. Um, but yeah, so thank you for listening in. Obviously this is the struck podcast and check us out on Spotify, iTunes, anywhere you listen to podcasts.
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