Analysis of Electric Shock Hazards due to Touch Current According to Soil Resistivity Ratio in Two-layer Earth Model

The touch or step voltages which exist in the vicinity of a grounding electrode are closely related to the earth structure and resistivity and the ground current. The grounding design approach is required to determine the grounding electrode location where the hazardous voltages are minimized. In this paper, in order to propose a method of mitigating the electric shock hazards caused by the ground surface potential rise in the vicinity of a counterpoise, the hazards relevant to touch voltage were evaluated as a function of the soil resistivity ratio for several practical values of two-layer earth structures. The touch voltage and current on the ground surface just above the test electrode are calculated with CDEGS program. As a consequence, it was found that burying a grounding electrode in the soil with low resistivity is effective to reduce the electric shock hazards. In the case that the bottom layer soil where a counterpoise is buried has lower resistivity than the upper layer soil, when the upper layer soil resistivity is increased, the surface potential is slightly raised, but the current through the human body is reduced with increasing the upper layer soil resistivity because of the greater contact resistance between the earth surface and the feet. The electric shock hazard in the vicinity of grounding electrodes is closely related to soil structure and resistivity and are reduced with increasing the ration of the upper layer resistivity to the bottom layer resistivity in two-layer soil.