
Lab Spotlight: New Lightning Services in Huntsville
January 25, 2021NTS continues to invest heavily in its 28 labs. The result? Expanded capabilities and new services at different labs across the country. As a result, let’s take a moment to highlight the recent multi-million dollar investment into our lab in Huntsville, Alabama. With the new investment, we expanded high-flow steam capabilities, HALT testing, and MIL-STD-167 capabilities at the lab. Perhaps more impressively, however, we added new indirect lightning services.
As you know, the indirect effects of lightning are caused primarily by earth-voltage rises that occur when the flash dumps charge into the earth and by the intense electromagnetic field associated with the flash. These fields and earth-voltage rises have enough energy to cause component damage up to a kilometer or more from the actual strike. Indirect effects are most commonly induced into system interconnecting cables and may damage or upset electronic components.
To ensure your product is able to function as you expect after a nearby lightning strike, you need to conduct indirect lightning testing. And with the new investment, the engineers at the Huntsville lab can simulate the indirect effects of a lightning strike. As a result, you can now get complete field and transient analysis to perform pin injection, transformer injection, and related tests in the heart of Rocket City.