A Transmission Line Modeling (TLM) Algorithm to Evaluate Grounding Grids Including Soil Ionization

This paper presents an innovative numerical model-based on Transmission Line Modeling method (TLM) for the representation of grounding meshes including the non-linear soil disruption phenomenon. In the presented model, the soil ionization is represented by the temporal variation of conductive components taking into account the residual resistivity retained in the ionized region. Simulations are performed considering a grounding grid mesh submitted to a lightning surge. Comparisons with the state-of-the-art solutions are presented and demonstrate that the proposed technique is appropriate for representation of elaborated grounding grids, resulting in a faithfully and more accurate numerical model. Easy-to-implement model, without hard-to-design parameters, highlight potential aspects for real-life applications.