Laser ionization: a next-generation protective system
Thanks to its supreme know-how and technical infrastructure, L-Ion is involved in crucial reasearch and development projects and working double time to have all of it’s ESEs to adopt “Laser Trigered Ionisation” by around 2022.
Laser trigered ionisation technology has certain advantages over the existing lightning protection devices. These advantages has been validated through the experimental envinronments. And L-ion has a mission to bring this product alive from the experimental environment to our daily lives. Numerous universities worldwide are working on this technology some of these being University of Arizona and University of Central Florida.
High-intensity laser technology opened a new chance to develope a next-generation protective system that prevents lightning from hitting a building. Beams of high-energy focused light can strip electrons from molecules in the air. This ionizes the molecules and leaves behind a plasma channel, which a lightning strike would see as a path of least resistance. This would attract the lightning and provide a route that it would follow down into the ground. A similar but different technology is based on ionizing a channel through the air, locally lowering the gas density through heating and thereby creating a guide for the discharge along which there is reduced breakdown voltage.
A novel method has shown that lasers cannot only be used to guide discharges along straight lines, but also arcs and s-shapes. Instead, the light may be concentrated along a line, as within a Bessel beam (created using an axicon, or conical, lens), or along a parabola, as within an Airy beam (created using a binary phase mask). Both Airy and Bessel beams have the unusual ability of being able to “self-heal” – if their intensity peaks are blocked, these lasers may be able to reconstruct themselves on the other side of the obstacle. This is thanks to how different points along these lasers are sustained by different portions of the input beam that creates them.
A different approach is geo-engineering. Researchers are making progress in using ultrashort laser pulses to create lightning and cue cloud formation, with potential applications in agriculture, public safety and beyond. Today,it is possible to trigger electric discharges between charged electodes at distances reaching 500m. by sending a multi terawatt short laser pulse into the atmosphere.
