The SEFTIM family grows with the opening of SEFTIM Brazil. The goal is to meet the important needs of this country with severe thunderstorm and also to radiate throughout the region for lightning needs in Spanish and of course Portuguese speaking countries.

Another objective is also to develop our EMC actions outside France thanks to the recognized competence of the CEO of SEFTIM Brazil: Roberto Menna Barreto

Brazil (2016-2000) – Founder and manager partner of QEMC, a Brazilian consultancy company in the area of Electromagnetic Compatibility (EMC), including Lightning Protection, Cyber Security, EM Protection of IT facilities against TEMPEST and EMP.

Brazil (1985-1989) – Founder and manager partner of QALAB, the first EMC Consultancy company in Brazil.

Portugal (1989-1999) – EMC measurements, studies and design of protective measures for Electronic/Telecommunications systems in Portugal and Africa. President of CENELEC Portuguese Standardization Committees CTE 210 (EMC) and Member of “The dB Society” (USA).

Papers on EMC published in France, Brazil, Portugal, Spain, USA and Poland. More than 200 presentations of EMC Training Courses to Companies in Brazil and abroad.

Thanks to SEFTIM entities outside of France many lightning studies are done worldwide. Of course, it is generally not possible to list them all as the result of the study belongs exclusively to our custoemrs. Two typical studies have been performed recently :

• SEFTIM Indian Ocean : study for a power plant in Madagascar. The methodology is similar to the one used in France with a Lightning Risk Analysis, A Technical Study and in-fine an Initial Inpsection. The environmental risk has been taken into account using the methodology proposed by SEFTIM in international publications in order to expand the IEC 62305-2 standard. The study covers also of course the human risk as well as the loss of production that is crucial for Madagascar.
• SEFTIM Portugal : study for a plant producing bitumen in Portugal. The study has allowed to define accurately the needed protection means without implementing lightning protection measures everywhere. Furthermore sensitive equipments have been indentified by the LRA method that were not identified before.

Interception efficiency is the most important parameter to show the effectiveness of air-termination systems. The dynamic electro-geometrical model (DEGM), a numerical method, is capable of calculating such interception efficiencies. This model is purely based on international accepted models, parameters, deviations and dependencies, which are also comprised in the IEC 62305 series.

It is possible to optimize the positioning of the rods in order to obtain interception efficiency as high as the one calculated for the selected level of protection (90%). The rods with the lowest efficiency can be neglected and it is even possible to position the rods in an optimized way using the DEGM.

This approach is particularly interesting for complex shaped sites.

ILPS 2016 was from 21st to 22nd April in Porto. About a hundred person coming from 20 countries were participating to exchange about the trend in lightning protection. There were 4 sessions:

Session 1 : Lightning Protection – special designs, experience & practice

Session 2 : Laboratory and in situ test, standards

Session 3 : Lightning detection, earthing and miscellaneous

Session 4 : Lightning physics, simulation and theory

SEFTIM Portugal was ILPS 2016 sponsor (the Chairwoman of the organizing committee is member of SEFTIM Portugal team). It was the opportunity of a strong presence of SEFTIM with the co-chair session 3, and 2 member of SEFTIM Portugal, one of SEFTIM Brazil and 2 from SEFTIM France. 3 publications have been presented and can be downloaded from the “our papers” page under the item ILPS

A lot of debates animated the conference inside the meeting room or during the breaks and the lunches. An official diner, the mandatory but very charming Fado as well as a bit of port wine contributed to the nice mood.