Flash forward
Boeing's partnership with Cambridge University provides insight into how lightning strikes may affect airplane parts.
BNN
Inside one of Boeing’s lightning labs, this one located just north of Charleston, South Carolina, electrophysics scientist Louisa Michael and her colleagues drive high levels of electric current through aerospace components large and small. The idea is to mimic the effects lightning strikes can have on commercial airplanes and to study how the parts respond.
When capacitors discharge the current, the resulting strike emits a booming pop, but without the blue plasma arc typical of the bolts typically seen flashing across the night’s sky carrying millions of volts and billions of joules of energy.
The physics at play are relevant to just about every commercial aircraft in service. While airplanes are designed to withstand lightning strikes, each airplane is struck by lightning once a year, on average. Subsequent ground inspections determine if damage is present, and if so, if it falls within allowable damage limits for safe flying again and whether repairs are needed.
Michael and fellow researchers, part of the Boeing Research & Technology organization’s Electromagnetic Effects (EME) team, simulate these strikes through numerical modeling and by running actual current through airplane materials.
While lightning protection is engineered into Boeing airplanes and their sensitive electronic components, EME’s research can influence how parts are designed, shape recommended allowable damage limits that they carry and inform maintenance and repair practices.
Louisa Michael stands inside Boeing South Carolina's lightning lab where she and her colleagues create and test novel algorithms that simulate lightning effects on airplane parts. She joined Boeing in 2020. Forging partnerships
For Michael, who joined the EME team in 2020 with a doctorate from the University of Cambridge, the work is an unexpected departure from her research, which focused on sensitized explosions that could break down rock more efficiently. It served as Michael’s first foray into multi-physics modeling, or mathematical simulations, that account for interactions between the four states of matter: gases, liquids, elastoplastic solids and plasma.
After several industry-led projects as a postdoctoral researcher, Michael joined a new Cambridge team working in partnership with Boeing’s EME group. The aim was to create novel algorithms simulating the effects of lightning on airplane parts. While different than her past projects, Michael says that mathematically, the challenge itself was quite similar: employing differential equations to describe a physical problem. Her work and research at Cambridge and the university’s collaboration with Boeing — a partnership through Boeing’s Enterprise Technology Office — led to Michael joining the EME team full-time.
“It was cool to work on things that blow up,” Michael said of her early research. “And I thought I could never top that. And, yet, I ended up working with lightning.”
Louisa Michael and her colleagues review data produced by the EME lab's lightning pulsar tool. At Boeing South Carolina’s EME lab, the experiments take place in an enclosed shield room, with Michael and colleagues observing from a separate wing of the facility. A thermal camera measures how lightning heats up each part. A high-speed camera takes footage of flying particles and an open-shutter camera can capture all light emitted: from the moment the current strikes the material and creates a spark, to outgassing.
Louisa Michael peers through the lightning lab's test fixture, adjusting the next material the team will strike with electric current.Nuts and bolts
According to Michael, Boeing EME and Cambridge are to the point of being able to study what happens when lightning strikes individual nuts and bolts, insights being applied into internal Boeing models and tools. The Boeing-Cambridge partnership continues to shape EME’s approach to future research and Model Based Engineering, and ultimately how Boeing might someday apply this research into its aviation technology.
Now two years into her role, continuing to work with Cambridge has allowed Michael to keep one foot in both worlds — industry and academia — after finding an unexpected niche.
“There’s this small part of the world focused on lightning and aviation research, and an even smaller subset falling in the intersection between academia and industry,” Michael said. “It’s fascinating to work on such complex but very real problems.
"I get to experience them first hand. I get to collaborate with other people around the world who share my expertise in this area," she continued. "And all this would have not been possible without the very talented Cambridge research team and my exceptional Boeing EME teammates. It’s pretty exciting to see all of that coming together.”
Article by Maksim Goldenshteyn
Video and photos by Kaitlin Stansell
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