Modelling of lightning and its interaction with structures

Lightning is one of the most common and severe of electromagnetic threats. Understanding its impact on the safety of persons, system integrity and electromagnetic compatibility is of major importance. Predicting its interaction with structures using suitable numerical models is an essential step in designing systems with a high level of immunity to the lightning threat. The purpose of this paper is to show how to construct models suitable for predicting currents flowing on structures due to their interaction with lightning. Efficient models can only be constructed after one has a reasonable grasp of the phenomenology of lightning and its basic physics and has an appreciation of the kind of lightning effects on structures one is interested in studying. A brief introduction into these topics is thus given prior to the construction of models