Design and assessment of lightning protection systems in petroleum structures

The study concentrated on the different possible protection systems with comparison to reach the best effective type at a moderate cost. It was possible to develop a hybrid lightning protective system with minimum cost, two computer programs using Matlab technique to solve the problem to reach the optimum solution with the minimum cost. This was done by less time of execution although the number of iterations was tremendous. The new developed technique enables the design engineer to determine the effective protection distance with different rod heights. It makes it easy to use mixture of rods, for any rectangular and cylindrical structures.