Lightning effects in the vicinity of elevated structures

The overvoltage generated on electrical systems due to lightning strikes to the structure of nearby radio-base telecommunication station was evaluated by computational simulation. Representative configurations were adopted for the low voltage network, for the structure and for the grounding electrodes of the station. The relevance of the contribution of both the potential rise in the soil and the voltage induced by the flow of return stroke current was analyzed. Severe overvoltages were found for all analyzed cases. It exceeded 1 MV for specific critical conditions.