Development of lightning risk assessment software in accordance with IEC 62305–2

The IEC 62305-2 standard presents a risk management procedure to assess the risk due to all possible effects of lightning flashes to structures. This procedure is quite complicated. Hence it was felt that there is a strong motivation to develop a user friendly software tool to simplify the process of lightning risk assessment for designers. The Lightning Risk Assessment software developed has many powerful features which may excel the capabilities in existing packages. It can successfully consider any type of structure with any number of incoming lines. It allows for splitting the structure under consideration into multiple zones in order to pinpoint high risk areas. It then performs an accurate risk assessment and shows in just a few seconds where in the structure and why it is so important to arrange protection measures. Finally it guides the designer and provides him with the adequate protection measures to reduce a certain risk to or below the tolerable limit. The package is enhanced by incorporation of a graphical tool for estimating the collection area which provides a user interface for drawing the structure, however complex it is. The software was tested on the highest building in Sudan, the National Telecommunications Corporation building (+130 m high). Results were compared to the StrikeRisk v5.0 Risk Management Software by Furse and direct computation of IEC62305-2 and it was concluded that the package was more successful in calculation the risk components and the overall risk.