Effects of location, size and number of wind turbine receptors on blade lightning protection by voltage distribution analysis

Electric and magnetic fields generated by lightning cause a serious hazard to various systems. Nowadays, wind turbine installations with higher power capacity are increasing. Higher capacity requires higher height and so there is more probability of lightning strike. Blades are the most probable components to get struck by lightning. The most common lightning protection system for the blades consists of several metallic receptors on the blade´s surface. Those are connected to the ground by metallic down-conductors placed inside the blade shell. In this paper, the influence of the receptors´ configurations in protecting the blade against lightning strike is studied. For this purpose, an analysis procedure based on Finite Element Method (FEM) in COMSOL Multiphysics software environment is used. The voltage distribution around the blade is studied and simulated for various configurations of receptors. The obtained results are considered and the best configuration is investigated. The simulations are done on the blade model of a special wind turbine, which is “Vestas V47”.