Keeping Industrial Processes Active After Lighting Strikes

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The need for industrial lightning protection and surge protection devices and systems exists for two main reasons. The first and most obvious is to avoid damage to the equipment used in a process that would be caused by the lightning strike itself or the power surge that follows. Damage at the strike point is usually cataclysmic, resulting in fire and explosion at the strike point that will destroy nearly anything within a small radius of that point. Lightning is an unbelievably powerful entity, and as it seeks the easiest path to the earth and strikes tall structures it causes large amounts of destruction that are nearly impossible to avoid at the point where it hits. This is why the best defense against a lightning strike is a good offense, that offense representing proactive measures to draw the strike away from expensive or critical components in specific structures. Lightning protection is seen in the form of lightning rods or overhead shielding that draws the strike to itself, where is can be safely drawn down or routed to a safe place without damage. If it is possible within the facility to install items like these to divert lightning strikes completely away from more necessary components, there will be a certain percentage of successes and a certain percentage of failures. This is because even if there are lightning protection measures in place, it does not assure that lightning will only strike those components. This is why surge protection devices and systems must also make up the totality of protection systems with regards to lightning.

 

A successful lightning protection system will divert lightning strikes most of the time, leaving a percentage of strikes that will still occur to structures that house critical components, or to those components themselves. Lightning will produce a power surge that travels along any pathway it can to reach the earth, easily finding electrical and data transfer cables a mechanism to move from the strike point toward the earth. This creates a chain reaction of damage, with any component that is near the strike point and connected to another component further down or away also being impacted and damaged. This can not only create damage that is multiplied in it’s scope but also system failures that take necessary functionality down for the period until it can be restored. This can take critical services offline, or increase product costs through downtimes that add to the cost of goods. In order to minimize downtimes as well as damage costs, new and improved surge protection devices have been developed which do not need for resetting or replugging to maintain their functionality. This can reduce the amount of time that systems are offline, and ultimately improve the bottom line of almost any business through a more efficient process. Damage control and avoidance is only a single aspect of lighting and surge protection systems, with efficiency in process playing another major role.