A Direct Lightning Protection Method for Wind Turbine Blades Through the Design of Metal Mesh

Wind turbines often suffer from lightning strikes, icing and other disasters, which seriously affect the normal operation of the wind turbines. Installing an electric heating ice melting device on the blade can effectively remove the icing of the blade, but the electric heating device will increase the risk of lightning strikes on the wind turbines. In view of this problem, this paper proposes a metal mesh protection method. The metal mesh is spread between the primary flasher and the secondary flasher, and the blade is fixed by a crimping piece to effectively prevent the explosion and damage caused by the excessive contact resistance of the transition point. The flash connection test proves that the metal mesh designed in this paper has a flash connection rate of 100% for direct lightning strikes. Meanwhile, the metal mesh has been applied on-site in wind farms. After the selected wind turbine is protected by the metal mesh, there has been no lightning strike failure accident, which proves the effectiveness and reliability of the proposed metal mesh.