Burj Khalifa Dubai Lightning Strike - January 11, 2010
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RF Cafe Videos for Engineers - Burj Khalifa Dubai Lightning Strike - January 11, 2010

By now you have seen pictures of the Burj Khalifa Dubai - the world's tallest building. It stands 800 meters (2,625 feet) high and has more than 160 stories. A major concern other than earthquakes, high winds and terrorists flying airplanes into it is lightning strikes.

Being the highest point in the area, the designers needed to install a system capable of shunting the energy all the way to ground level and dissipate it safely in the dry, sandy soil. That requires handling typically 1 to 10 billion joules of energy with currents as high as 50,000 amps. Thus far, it has worked well. In the unlikely event that I ever visit the tower, I'll still follow my father's admonition to not touch the light switches or faucet during a storm - just in case...

Lightning rods were first used by Benjamin Franklin to protect the tall building in Philadelphia from catching fire every time a big lightning storm came along. The idea came from his experiments involving flying kites in electrical storms. Contrary to what a lot of people (RF Cafe visitors excluded), Franklin did NOT invent electricity; he proved that lightning was a form of electricity.

This video shows some pretty amazing lightning strikes in slow motion.

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Kirt Blattenberger,

BSEE - KB3UON

RF Cafe began life in 1996 as "RF Tools" in an AOL screen name web space totaling 2 MB. Its primary purpose was to provide me with ready access to commonly needed formulas and reference material while performing my work as an RF system and circuit design engineer. The World Wide Web (Internet) was largely an unknown entity at the time and bandwidth was a scarce commodity. Dial-up modems blazed along at 14.4 kbps while tying up your telephone line, and a nice lady's voice announced "You've Got Mail" when a new message arrived...

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Burj Khalifa Dubai Lightning Strike - January 11, 2010Videos for Engineers

Burj Khalifa Dubai Lightning Strike - January 11, 2010
Videos for Engineers