Monte Carlo Simulation To Estimate Likelihood of Direct Lightning Strikes

A software tool has been designed to quantify the lightning exposure at launch sites of the stack at the pads under different configurations. In order to predict lightning strikes to generic structures, this model uses leaders whose origins (in the x–y plane) are obtained from a 2D random, normal distribution. The striking distance is a function of the stroke peak current, which is obtained from a random state machine that extracts the stroke peak current from a lognormal distribution. The height in which the leaders are originated is fixed and chosen to be several "strike distances" greater than the tallest object under study.