On the Effects of Channel Tortuosity in Lightning-Induced Voltages Assessment

We present a study on lightning-induced voltages on overhead lines produced by tortuous lightning channels, by using a recently developed tool called CiLIV (Andreotti et al. 2015). CiLIV, initially developed for straight and vertical channels, is here extended to account for tortuosity. High-resolution stereoscopic images of six triggered lightning channels have been 3-D digitized and used as input data for CiLIV. The result is that tortuosity, usually ignored in lightning-induced voltage assessment, can instead play a significant role: an attempt is made in characterizing and quantifying these effects. It is shown that, in contrast to other lightning parameters, like channel-base peak current, which are log-normally distributed and generate log-normally distributed induced voltages too, tortuosity generates normally distributed induced voltages. It is also shown that these voltages can deviate up to 23% (relative standard deviation) from the mean value.