Investigation of lightning direct effects on aircraft materials

Lightning is one of the most unpredictable and destructive forces in nature, and ensuring the protection and safety of aircraft in flight, as well as other modes of airborne transport, when struck by lightning presents a unique set of engineering challenges. In order to progress into a new generation of conductive carbon composites and/or embedded light-weight lightning protection systems, further scientific understanding is required on the mechanisms and impact of lightning on carbon composite aircraft. This paper recalls how modern lightning research has progressed from deducing information from natural lightning events to reproducible and instrumented lightning generators capable of accurate and repeatable experimentation. Results of investigations on how aerospace materials, with and without lightning protection, react when struck by lightning are presented illustrating the extent of damage that could be caused. Furthermore, methods of studying lightning effects, such as mechanical deflection, chemical element interaction, and temperature measurements, are then presented to illustrate the role of lightning experimentation as a means to help support aspects of modelling such as material behavior, aircraft design and potentially flight performance