Issue link: https://resources.mouser.com/i/1437723
5 Surge Protection Is a Balancing Act As consumer products and industrial equipment grow increasingly dependent on voltage-sensitive, data-driven control systems, effective surge protection has become a critical design consideration to help ensure operational reliability. For many devices and applications, the right surge-protection technology plays a key role in a product's long-term success, especially for business and industrial systems, where the cost of equipment downtime is high. Similarly, the safety and owner satisfaction of entertainment and domestic products may depend on effective surge protection. A power surge, or power transient, is a brief increase in voltage that has the potential to damage equipment. Perhaps the most familiar and notorious power surges are caused by lightning. When lightning strikes, it typically has an electrical potential of 40,000 to 100,000 volts (V), lasts about 20 microseconds (µs), and can have a peak current of 5,000 to 200,000 amperes. Such power can create a transient power surge capable of thoroughly destroying electrical components, sometimes in a highly spectacular fashion. Lightning is an external transient—that is, it comes from outside a facility, home, or factory—but it is only one possible cause of power transients. Such surges can also come from the power grid itself, triggered by transformer switching, capacitor switching, line switching, or fuse operation. Surge Protection Is a Balancing Act Chapter One "Transient power surges can degrade the contacting surfaces of switches, disconnectors, and circuit breakers. Intermittent transients can produce the untimely tripping of breakers by heating them up. Then the breakers react to the non-existent current demand and burn out before their original lifespans end." Nida Qamar, Project and Design Engineer, Eaton