Effect of Lightning Surge in AC Power and Telecommunication Lines for Electrical Devices

Lightning surge phenomenon has been recognized as one of a threat to electrical and electronics devices. This event can cause degradation to the devices performance and at high energy can cause the total failure in devices operation. This research work objective is to observe and monitor the effect of lightning surge to electrical devices especially through their power lines and telecommunication lines port. The surge immunity test was conducted using lightning surge simulator to evaluate the immunity of electrical equipment such as multifunction printer, laser fax and integrated telephone systems to ensure them continues reliability operation. Variable voltage values have been injected to electrical devices in an increasing value up to 15 kV or until the devices cannot withstand the voltage and start to degrade, temporary lost function and totally lost function. The devices performance and behavior has been monitored at the normal performance until abnormality performance has been observed and amount of voltage value at that time were recorded for analysis purpose. From this experiment, the high functional devices such as multi-function printer had the lowest immunity to the surge value followed by laser fax and lastly is integrated telephone systems. It was shown that the degradation and damage would occur if there were some narrow coincidence between the phase angle of waveform and superposition of surge. In this case, the frequently occur at phase angle of 90° and 270°, respectively. The results revealed that the worst and high probability for damage to occur towards coupling/decoupling network is at common mode compare to differential mode (L-PE & N-PE).