The Effect of Lightning on Aircraft Wings

For my BA dissertation I worked in a team of 5 to produce an apparatus capable of measuring how an aircraft skin behaves when struck by lightning. The full report can be downloaded here.

We worked closely with Cobham Electrical on this project. We used their high voltage Marx Generator that can create a controlled lightning strike. I was the primary point of contact between our team and the industry professionals.

Working with lightning posed several potential issues. For safety, no electrical connections could extend from the test area meaning our system had to be totally self contained. In addition to this we had to shield all sensitive electronics from the high EM environment.

After a collaborative design process we settled on an optical system that would focus the dot of a laser beam onto a position sensitive photodiode. This would give us the required 100 µm and 20 µs resolution.

Analysing the circuit from the photodiode required a system of electronics that could handle the necessary analogue arithmetic. This had to be designed, soldered and debugged by us. This fed data into a microprocessor that recorded data in a manor inspired by high speed photography.

Unfortunately, due to the optical noise present in the test environment our trigger kept activating at incorrect times and we got no usable data. I am confident with a more reliable trigger this project would have been a viable solution.

I went on to present this project at the In[SCI]te undergraduate science conference where I attended several public speaking workshops.