A numerical solver to assess the impact of wind, geometry, and altitude on artificial charge control of aircraft using corona discharge

Prior work by members of the team has shown that active charge control might reduce the risk of aircraft-triggered lightning. Controlling the net charge of an aircraft can be achieved by using corona discharge. For a positive corona, positive ions are generated by the discharge and advected away by the wind, charging the aircraft negatively. The charging phase is inherently transient but for a given geometry, applied voltage, and wind speed the system rapidly reaches a steady state of charging. This work develops a numerical solver with the goal of accelerating the simulation capabilities to investigate methods to artificially charge an aircraft. The ultimate objective of the model is to study the geometry and altitude effect on the charging process. As a first step, this contribution presents preliminary results for the steady state solution. The results from the newly developed electrostatic solver show a notable increase in speed versus commercial solvers, which is the most expensive component of the simulations, due to the large number of degrees of freedom generated while discretizing the domain.This work is supported by the MIT MISTI Global Seed Funds MIT-Spain project "Smart Lightning Protection Systems for Wind Turbines and Aircraft" and "Small Unmanned Airborne Systems for Atmospheric Electricity Research", sponsored by LaCaixa. This work was also supported by a research grant from the Spanish Ministry of Economy EXPLORA call with reference ENE2017-91636-EXP.Postprint (published version