Creating a Catenary Lightning Protection System

by Lucas Erickson

Submitted : Fall 2015

A Lightning Protection System is a structure that diverts and/or absorbs lightning strikes. Some of these structures uses hanging wires over cargo to accomplish this goal. These wires hang with their weight only supported at the end, in the shape of a catenary, based off the graph of the hyperbolic cosine function multiplied by a scaling factor a. The lightning protection system being made needs to have six wires connect four concrete poles, four creating a rectangle and two diagonally across the middle. Three different lengths are used, two wires for each length. By using calculus in this project, the length of wire needed to connect all four concrete poles can be determined if the distance between poles and how low the wires hang is provided.

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