A Streamer Inhibitor, a Streamer Inhibiting Electrode or simply an Inhibitor is a lightning air terminal that is specifically designed to predictably reduce the risk of a direct lightning strike to a structure.
A Streamer Inhibitor uses the ambient electric fields to produce charges in the glow mode over a very broad voltage range.
A Streamer inhibitor does not use points or point electrodes to produce charges, an Inhibitor uses patented thin-conductor coils (diameter: 0.05mm - 0.01mm) to produce charges via glow mode corona or DC or pulseless corona. When it comes to the production of electric charges, the Inhibitor has five major advantages over any device that uses point electrodes.
1. An Inhibitor, by variation of its dimensions can be tuned to begin the production of electric charges at very low levels of the ambient ground field or at very low levels of the slowly varying electric fields that precede a lightning strike.
2. By varying the dimensions of the electrode the rate of charge produced can be varied. This is not the case with a point electrode device since it has been shown that increasing the number of points does not increase the rate of charge production. ref. [5].
3. Unlike any device that uses point electrodes, an Inhibitor is not prone to the production of streamers, an Inhibitor produces charges or (corona) in the glow-mode (streamer free) over a very broad range of electric field strengths.
4. Since the Inhibitor produces charges in the glow-mode it can produce far greater rates of charge than any device that uses point electrodes.
5. In addition to sustaining the glow-mode corona under the slowly varying electric fields that precede a lightning strike, an Inhibitor continues to produce glow-mode corona under the rapidly varying electric fields of the remote descending lightning leader.
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