Abstract
This paper study of electric field distribution near a lightning rod。Lightning rod is a device which is used to prevent high-rise buildings from lightning strikes. Generally speaking, thundercloud in the air has electrostatic energy when it has not discharged with other objects which have charges of different polarity with it. By regard the lightning rod as a grounding conical conductor in the electrostatic field of thundercloud，we can transform the problem which we study into a problem of solving the electric field distribution in the surface of a conductor in the electrostatic field. We can get boundary conditions based on maxwell equations and electrostatic conditions of conductor. The paper gives solutions of laplace equations satisfy boundary conditions by separation of variables and electrical field strength near the tip of lightning rod by calculating，and analyzes principle of point discharge according to electrodynamics theory to make a better study of working principle of lightning rod. We can have a more intuitionist observation of electric field distribution near the lightning rod by MATLAB simulation.
Keywords：Lightning rod；Electrostatic field；Maxwell's equations；Laplace equation；point discharge；MATLAB simulation
