0

I went on a new building, for installing many "details" before people relocating inside. On the roof, I saw a very intriguing things about lightning conductor : they are inside walls, packed inside the concrete (like the green things in the photograph). Conductor seems to be in copper. The one outside is in steel, and only on the wall, never inside.

For me this could be problematic because lightning are typically very powerful, especially where the building is. For me lightning could be more than 400kA, more than 1MV, for around 1ms. I'm sure it's sufficient energy to vaporise a lightning conductor like these.

And inside the wall, this could also blow up the concrete around the conductor, and make on the building a lot of damage like "not fixable one".

This part is totally out of my scope. I have no skills in this domain. I want to understand, because it caught my attention ;)

What do you think ?

enter image description here

Megagolgoth
  • 1
  • 1
  • while lightning is very powerful, just how much energy per inch (R*I^2 gets you power but it is brief, transferring the energy elsewhere) will your rod endure? Copper is more conductive than steel so R is lower. what temperature increase can you expect from that? what kind of thermal expansion? You can then calculate stresses via pressure required to prevent such an expansion. – Abel Jan 07 '22 at 13:16
  • I could find all the spec and calculate, but it will be overkill. My question is more like this : Is it common to embed lightning conductor inside wall, in term of architecture, building engineering ? If yes, what happen when the conductor discharge a lightning (expansion / wall damages)? – Megagolgoth Jan 07 '22 at 13:37
  • I closed you question because in its current form is is the exact same as the previous question (about what happens to a down conductor when it is hit by lightning). You posted a comment that makes it sound like you also want to know about whether is is common to place a down conductor in a certain location. That would be a separate question. If you have that question, please ask it directly. – hazzey Jan 07 '22 at 14:48
  • I don't know the technical details of the lightning protection method, but from experience, all reinforced concrete mass/tall structures have lightning cables connected to the reinforcing steel to allow fast dissipation of the electrical power through the steel grid, and eventually passed to the ground. I've never seen/heard any problem with that. – r13 Jan 07 '22 at 18:16

0 Answers0