Research on earth surface potential distribution and amendment for soil resistivity horizontal hierarchical model in current inflow test

ABSTRACTAn accurate soil resistivity horizontal hierarchical model (SRHHM) is critical to selecting the site of the DC ground electrode. In order to build an relatively accurate model, current inflow test is carried out to test the accuracy of the initial SRHHM. However, there is no existing unified method to guide how to amend the initial model through current inflow test. Therefore, based on practical cases, this paper establishes a two-dimensional axisymmetric finite element model for current inflow test by using the ANSYS software, and studies the effect of each layer soil resistivity on the Earth surface potential (ESP) distribution. Based on these studies, some basic rules of amendment for SRHHM are proposed. Furthermore, the proposed rules are applied to the current inflow test of the actual project in Yi’an Chong, Hunan. The results show that the amended soil resistivity horizontal hierarchical model is better in fitting the ESP distribution obtained from the current inflow test.