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Response to the ILPA posting: “MR. HARTONO’S OVERLOOK OF CONVENTIONAL

LIGHTNING PROTECTION SYSTEM’S FAILURES”

By Z. A. Hartono and I. Robiah Senior Members IEEE (USA)

Lightning Research Pte. Ltd., Malaysia E-mail: zahartono@gmail.com, zahartono@ieee.org

This paper was written in response to the above posting dated 14th October 2010 made by the International Lightning Protection Association (ILPA) on their website (http://www.intlpa.org/ilpa.html) and blogspot (http://intlpa.blogspot.com/). The posting was written by Trang Bui, an E-marketing Assistant at ILPA, and Sylvain Fauveaux, an ESE patent holder at Indelec SA (France) Lightning Protection in response to our recent article “The Minaret Incidents at Putrajaya”. http://tinyurl.com/minaretincident (Click this link to download)

The objective of this paper is to refute the claim made by Bui and Fauveaux (B&F) that “(Hartono) purposely overlooks many bypasses of buildings using conventional lightning protection systems (LPS)” and to analyse the examples of conventional systems “failures” that they posted.

1) “(Mr. Hartono) purposely overlooks many bypasses of buildings using conventional lightning protection systems (LPS)”

This claim is ridiculous because Hartono’s numerous pictures of bypasses to conventional systems, which he submitted to Standards Australia and the IEC more than a decade ago, had resulted in the addition of a new air terminal placement method in the Australian and IEC standards in 2003 and 2006 respectively.

In fact, a letter dated 19th October 1999 from Mr. Lefort to Professor Darveniza of Australia had praised Hartono’s “excellent survey” on the conventional system failures. Since Mr. Lefort is also the President of Indelec and ILPA, B&F’s claim about Hartono is bizarre and absolutely untrue. They were either ignorant of Hartono’s contribution to the international standards activities or else they were trying to mislead the public on his important contributions on air terminal placement in the Australian and IEC standards.

It is plainly obvious that the posting about Hartono suggest that B&F have ran out of new ideas to prove that the ESE technology is viable. Since Hartono has provided more compelling evidence that the ESE technology is invalid, it seems that they have no other options but to undermine his credentials by spreading nonsensical statements to the public.

[Note: It is believed that B&F were the ILPA “expert members” referred to by Mr. Lefort in his letter dated September 24, 2010.]

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2) Failure examples of conventional systems B&F provided three examples which they claimed were “failures” of the

conventional LPS. However, our analyses of the photographs showed otherwise.

A) The (San Pedro) Cathedral of Matagalpa, Nicaragua

The cathedral has two towers, a bell tower and a clock tower. In the “after” picture posted by B&F, the pinnacle on top of the clock tower was found to have been destroyed by a direct lightning strike while the pinnacle on top of the bell tower seemed to have been installed with some sort of air terminal (Figure 1).

A web search on the cathedral results in the same “before” picture as the one posted in the blog but at a much higher resolution. A close inspection of the clock tower revealed that no air terminal had been installed on its pinnacle (Figure 2). Therefore, a direct strike on the unprotected pinnacle of the clock tower would result in damage that is similar to the one which occurred at the bell tower in Sigolsheim. http://tinyurl.com/belltowerincident

Therefore, this example does not reflect the failure of the conventional LPS but the failure of the LPS to comply with the conventional LPS standard i.e. a human error. Clearly, B&F were trying to mislead the public with this example.

Fig. 1: The Cathedral at Matagalpa, Nicaragua before and after a bypass on 29th August 2010,

as posted by Bui and Fauveaux. (The white circle was added by Hartono for clarity.)

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Fig. 2: A close-up picture of the clock tower of the cathedral before the bypass on 29th August

2010. No air terminal could be seen on the pinnacle of the tower.

B) Bungalow in Damansara Idaman, Malaysia

The bungalow, which was installed with the conventional LPS, suffered minor damages after being struck by lightning. The lightning strike did not cause a fire but several clay tiles below the conventional air terminal and along the ridge of the roof seemed to have been dislodged (Figure 3).

Fig. 3: The bungalow in Damansara Idaman as posted by Bui and Fauveaux.

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A close examination of the top picture revealed that the conventional LPS had not been designed according to the Malaysian (MS-IEC61024) or British (BS6651) lightning protection standards that were in force then. If the LPS had fully complied with the above standards, then air terminals should have been installed very near to the ridge ends of the roof (Figure 4).

Conventional LPS that were not designed according to the standard usually failed to comply with the installation requirements as well. In cases such as this, the copper strip conductors were installed with prohibited sharp bends and loops since that made the building appear aesthetically pleasing. When the air terminal is struck by lightning, these conductors tend to straighten out due to the strong mechanical forces exerted by the high opposing electromagnetic fields. This will dislodge the roof tiles along their path as observed in the example given by B&F.

Fig. 4: Only two conventional air terminals (arrowed) were seen on the roof of the bungalow. The absence of air terminals near the ridge ends of the roof (circled) suggests that the LPS design did not comply with the standard. The row of tiles dislodged from the ridge of the roof suggests that the copper strip conductor had not been installed according to the standard.

More than 90% of the conventional LPS designed and installed in Malaysia did not fully comply with the abovementioned LPS standards. This situation came about because the majority of the engineers and contractors in this field had failed to refer to the standards when they designed and/or constructed the LPS.

Furthermore, some of the public lightning protection education courses were conducted by proponents of the ESE technology, such as Mr. Mak Ming Hung, an ESE vendor and critic of Hartono and Dr. Mousa. In addition, lightning protection at university level was conducted by Professor Hussein Ahmad and his colleagues at the University of Technology Malaysia (UTM). Both these individuals had openly opposed

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the conventional LPS and standards in their publications and had influenced their students and course participants to do the same.

http://www.lightningsafety.com/nlsi_lhm/misconceptions-about-lightning.pdf

C) Hilton (Hotel) Kuala Lumpur

The example provided by B&F did not show either a bypass or the failure of the conventional air terminal to intercept the lightning stroke. Rather, it revealed the failure to bond the strip conductor to the building rebar as required by the standards. This caused a flashover between the strip conductor and a rebar located just a few centimeters below it, which resulted in the broken masonry (Figure 5). The actual lightning interception could have occurred on the air terminal shown in the example but a close up picture of the tip is required to confirm this.

This kind of flashover example is unfortunately very common due to the failure of the LPS designers or contractors to comply with the conventional standards as discussed earlier. They show the need for proper bonding of the various LPS components to the building rebars and nearby metal works in order to prevent flashovers from happening.

Fig. 5: The Hilton (Hotel) example as posted by Bui and Fauveaux.

Coincidentally, a similar example was also included in the Indelec article to the technical community in India. The Indelec author then had also made the wrong conclusions regarding the “bypass” below the air terminal.

CONCLUSIONS Although we respect B&F’s wish not to get into what they claimed to be a

“childish debate”, we are duty bound to expose the inaccurate information made by them whether it is personal or technical in nature.

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The ILPA and Indelec have an inherent fear that the public may accede to Hartono’s pictures of bypasses on ESE-protected buildings if they (the public) knew that he is not just an LPS consultant but also a researcher whose findings had the approval of the international scientific community for more than a decade.

Therefore, it is apparent from the earlier discussions that their incorrect blog information about Hartono is motivated by their need to portray him as “just another conventional LPS consultant in Malaysia who goes around taking pictures of ESE-protected buildings being struck by lightning……” They even falsely claimed that “Hartono purposely overlooks many bypasses of buildings using conventional LPS” when they already knew that he had submitted those pictures (of bypasses to conventional systems) to the IEC more than a decade ago.

The examples of conventional LPS “failures” provided by B&F are typical of the misleading information that the ESE proponents have been spreading to the uninformed public for the past two decades. Those examples represented cases of conventional LPS design and construction that failed to fully comply with the standards. The ESE proponents must have known this but they have made these examples to look as if they were conventional LPS “failures” in order to convince the uninformed public.

There are other examples of how the ESE proponents mislead the public. They can be found in our 2004 paper:

http://www.lightningsafetyalliance.com/documents/acem_air_terminals.pdf

Hence the public is advised to be cautious of the information provided by the proponents of the ESE technology.

Revised: November 1, 2010