【讲座主题】

Säntis Lightning Research Facility: Recent Developments and Findings.

【讲座介绍】

Starting from 2009, a new research project financed by the Swiss National Science Foundation and the European COST Action P18 allowed the instrumentation of the Säntis tower in Switzerland for the measurement of lightning currents. This tower is struck by lightning more than 100 times a year and it represents a unique structure to collect experimental information related to lightning discharges.

In this presentation, we will give an overview of the facility and a description of salient results obtained from the analysis of the data recorded during the first decade of its operation. In particular, we will describe a recent experimental campaign carried out in 2021 to evaluate the possibility of guiding and initiating lightning using high-power lasers.

Farhad Rachidi received the M.S. degree in electrical engineering and the Ph.D. degree from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Lausanne, Switzerland, in 1986 and 1991, respectively. He was with the Power Systems Laboratory, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, until 1996. In 1997, he joined the Lightning Research Laboratory, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada. From 1998 to 1999, he was with Montena EMC, Rossens, Switzerland. He is currently a Titular Professor and the Head of the EMC Laboratory with the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Lausanne, Switzerland. He has authored or co-authored over 200 scientific papers published in peer-reviewed journals and over 400 papers presented at international conferences.

Dr. Rachidi is currently a member of the Advisory Board of the IEEE Transactions on Electromagnetic Compatibility and the President of the Swiss National Committee of the International Union of Radio Science. He has received numerous awards including the 2005 IEEE EMC Technical Achievement Award, the 2005 CIGRE Technical Committee Award, the 2006 Blondel Medal from the French Association of Electrical Engineering, Electronics, Information Technology and Communication (SEE), the 2016 Berger Award from the International Conference on Lightning Protection, the Best Paper Award of the IEEE Transactions on EMC (2016 and 2018), and the Motohisa Kanda Award for the most cited paper of the IEEE Transactions on EMC (2012-2016 and 2014-2018). In 2014, he was conferred the title of Honorary Professor of the Xi’an Jiaotong University in China. He served as the Vice-Chair of the European COST Action on the Physics of Lightning Flash and its Effects from 2005 to 2009, the Chairman of the 2008 European Electromagnetics International Symposium, the President of the International Conference on Lightning Protection from 2008 to 2014, the Editor-in-Chief of the Open Atmospheric Science Journal (2010-2012) and the Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Electromagnetic Compatibility from 2013 to 2015. He is a Fellow of the IEEE and of the SUMMA Foundation, and a member of the Swiss Academy of Natural Sciences.