Boeing composite wing lightning strike internship project

Painted aluminum vs bare aluminum vs composite wing response to lightning; Tom's student internship at Boeing on composite-wing lightning strikes. Connects to the §2.p3 stainless-steel-tubing case through shared failure physics.

This also occurs on aircraft wings. If you paint an aircraft and lightning hits it, the paint can actually focus the lightning energy, and it can take one ten percent of the energy of a lightning stroke to perforate the wing on an aircraft. What's the problem of perforating the wing on an aircraft? Fuel. Your aircraft wing is actually your fuel container. It's your structural wing for support, but it also contains fuel. So they do lots of tests at Boeing and other places. I had a student do an internship at Boeing and she was working on lightning strikes to aircraft wings, although she was doing composites. I know a lot about what happens when you hit an aluminum wing that's bare, or a painted aluminum wing — the two things are different. Just putting a coat of paint on it makes a big difference in how the lightning attacks it. But Chu was working on composites because Boeing wants to use more and more composites to make lighter and lighter weight vehicles.