At the end of September, Streamer's topics have been presented at ICLP-SIPDA

ICLP together with SIPDA, and APL (Asia-Pacific Conference on Lightning Protection) are three major events for engineers and scientists dealing with lightning all over the world. Each conference is held every two years and gathers participants of all ages and ranks, from master students to world-level experts, in a different location each time: Shanghai, Hong Kong, Vienna, Estoril to name just a few of the previous venues. 

The Streamer team have taken part in the ICLP event several times in the past, each time giving presentations, displaying posters, taking part in discussions, making new contacts, and of course, gathering knowledge.

However, in 2020 everything changed because of the COVID pandemic, so the visit to Colombo in Sri-Lanka, the planned conference site, did not happen. In 2021 the situation had still not improved enough to have returned to the normal state; nevertheless, it was decided to go ahead and hold the conference, but this time in what has now become a popular format - online.

Despite the unusual method of organization, the conference structure was left almost unchanged: the conference days started with invited lectures and session presentations. Among the invited speakers were Vladimir Rakov, Farhad Rachidi, Markos Rubinstein, Carlo Alberto Nucci, and Alexandre Piantini – all real superstars of lightning protection. The talks given by Prof. Rachidi and Dr. Rubinstein must be emphasized since both were devoted to the time reversal method, which is extensively employed in Streamer’s perspective project, SEFL. It is also important to mention the lecture of Prof. Piantini since it highlighted the recent progress in the analysis of lightning induced overvoltages – a topic significant for power system protection specialists. As for the sessions talks, there were so many that deserved our attention that it would take too much time to list them all.

Two representatives from Streamer, Alexander Chusov and Prof. Georgyi Podporkin, participated in the online conference as speakers, both in the same topic area - Lightning Protection of Power Systems. Prof. Podporkin’s paper described new achievements in LLPD development, while Chusov’s paper was about the investigation of LLPD performance at high altitude. Both presentations went well, including question/answer sessions and discussions. 

At the end of the day all the tasks were accomplished, and the conference had been successful despite the unusual circumstances. Next stop is ICLP2022 in Cape Town, hopefully in person this time rather than on line…

Conference Website https://iclp2020.org/