An improved approach for modeling lightning transients of wind turbines

A modeling approach is proposed in this paper for calculating lightning transient responses on wind turbines (WTs). The equivalent circuits are built for blade, dynamic contact part, tower body and grounding system, respectively. The improved tower model discretizes the tower body into a truncated pyramid multiconductor system and can describe the geometrical feature of the actual tower body in a more precise manner. An entire circuit representation is given for the WT by connecting the respective equivalent circuits, from which the lightning transient responses can be obtained. The experimental measurement is also made with a laboratory-scale WT. The validity of the proposed approach is checked by comparing the calculated results with the measured ones. Then, the proposed approach is applied to the lightning transient calculation of an actual WT with 2 MW to predict its potential rise during lightning stroke.