Project Description

Joan Montanyà was born in Súria (Barcelona), Spain, in 1975. He received the B.S. degree in Industrial Engineering and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from the Polytechnic University of Catalonia, Barcelona, Spain, in 2000 and 2004, respectively. He joined the Department of Electrical Engineering of the Polytechnic University of Catalonia as Adjunct Lecturer in 1997. In 2003 he became Assistant Professor and, since 2011, he is Associated Professor. He did several short stays at the University of Arizona (Tucson, AZ, US), the Laboratoire d’Aérologie (Toulosue, France) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Cambridge, MA, US).

He is author and co-author of more than 140 publications related to atmospheric electricity including lightning protection, transient luminous events, terrestrial gamma ray flashes (TGF), lightning warning, high energy radiation from lightning and laboratory sparks, thunderstorm electrification, severe weather and Schumann resonance. He has special interest in lightning protection of wind turbine blades with composite materials. He is currently the head of the UPC Lightning Research Group. He participated in more than twelve research projects related to lightning research being principal investigator of seven projects. Four of these projects are related to the Atmosphere-Space Interactions Monitor (ASIM) an ESA mission in order to investigate the origin of the TGF.

Since 2014 he is member of the International Commission on Atmospheric Electricity. He is also member of several international standardization groups for lightning protection. He is convener of the EU CENELEC TC81X/WG5 for the standard EN 50536 ‘Protection against lightning -Thunderstorm warning systems’. He is an active member of the IEC TC 88 PT 24 about lightning protection of wind turbines. He is also active in several CIGRE SC C4 committees including the committee WG C4.409related to lightning protection of wind turbine blades, the WG C4.410 about lightning to very tall objects and the WG C4.36 related to Winter Lightning.mont