New IISc study could help protect aircraft from lightning   

BENGALURU: A team of IISc researchers has developed a new way to simulate how lightning hits an aircraft. The team believes this will help in providing better protection to aircraft against lightning.

Prof Udaya Kumar of IISc’s Department of Electrical Engineering, who headed the team said, “Usually, an aircraft is hit by lightning once every 1,000 hours. There’ve been many incidents in the last century when the impact of lightning has been catastrophic.” In 90 per cent of the cases, lightning strikes on an aircraft are self-invited when it is flying through a highly energised cloud which means the aircraft is the cause of the lightning strike. The research will help in understanding how lightning disrupts the aircraft’s electrical systems which could lead to catching fire or explosion. 

“Kumar and his team realised that the current approach to this identification was grossly oversimplified. They set out to develop a more comprehensive computational model which can be applied to two different aircraft geometries: A DC10 passenger aircraft and the SDM fighter aircraft model.

It involves extensive computation of electric field around the aircraft and suitable modelling of the electrical discharges,” an IISc statement said. “Kumar’s lab has also carried out a first-of-its-kind experiment on a small military aircraft by injecting it with enormous amounts of current and by collecting data from inside the craft,” the IISc stated.