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Re: [TowerTalk] Tower grounding

To: towertalk@contesting.com
Subject: Re: [TowerTalk] Tower grounding
From: K8RI <K8RI-on-TowerTalk@tm.net>
Date: Thu, 18 Jul 2013 08:30:12 -0400
List-post: <towertalk@contesting.com">mailto:towertalk@contesting.com>
On 7/18/2013 12:40 AM, Jim Lux wrote:
On 7/17/13 6:55 PM, David Gilbert wrote:

Your hysterics aside, almost all of that is patently false, and in most
locations is directly contrary to code.  You really need to study what a
Ufer ground is and why they work.

By the way, this same old wives tale comes up every so often here and on
other forums, and each time it does I spend about a half hour doing
Google searches to find any documented instances of a block of concrete
exploding because of steam expansion from a lightning strike.  I have
found TONS of discussion and endless repetitions of the same old
exhortation you just made, but not a single first hand account of
exploding concrete due to steam.  Concrete is quite brittle and
fractures easily, and I could far better imagine that the intense
thermal shock generated by a lightning hit would instead be the
culprit.  I have indeed witnessed first hand a lightning strike blasting
a chunk out of solid granite rock alongside the road I was driving on
(scared the hell out of me), and I guarantee that rock was dry as a bone.


I would agree here.  I've seen lightning damaged concrete, but there
were no conductors anywhere near it. It was a strike in the middle of a
concrete pad.  The damage was pretty minor.  You'd do more damage
beating on it with a hammer.

I've seen spots on metal where the stroke apparently attached (e.g. the
tippy top of a pointed lightning rod).

I think that to do serious mechanical damage, there has to be a set of
circumstances for the lightning current that are somewhat unusual.

As I said the tower here took at least 17 hits. There was mechanical damage on only one hit. It blew all the water proofing off the connectors and removed all the silver plating. No other physical damage was visible. All the antennas were fine. There were large chunks of the weatherproofing laying on the ground. They all looked like pieces of expanded metal.

I also lost a 2-meter rig and computer

This was early on before all the grounding was in, but I doubt if that would have made any difference on the mechanical damage. Since all the grounding system was finished the tower took most of the hits and I've had no damage to equipment and nothing visible "up there".




You need a sort of moderate resistance.. if the resistance is low
enough, then it just conducts the tens of kA and gets warm.  Something
like damp sand, though, is resistive enough that you get a lot of
dissipation, and it fuses the sand.  It's a fairly narrow range of
resistivity though.. I was trying to make fulgurites in my backyard with
a big capacitor bank, and it's hard work.

Something like a tree is going to get damaged: you have a resistive
layer but still conductive damp layer under the bark.  The current
flows, the thermal capacity is small, so it gets hot quick, boiling the
water, etc.

We had about a 30' pine tree across the road take a hit and literally explode, leaving about a 3' stump. The longest piece was about 3 or 4 feet long. It was stuck in the ground about 30 to 40 feet from the stump. It was in so deep we couldn't pull it out, but had to dig it out. That neighbor had no damage, but the one on the other side of him lost most of the appliances in the house and his well, telephone and breaker panel. It never touched the tower with the top of the array at 130' which was closer to the tree than the neighbor that had all the damage.


73

Roger (K8RI)


Wooden structures are probably similar...

Things where there's a spark gap that arcs over is also a problem: now
you've got a concentrated heat source.
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