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The purpose of this paper is to investigate the simultaneous effects of ionization and dispersion of soil on the impulse behavior of grounding electrodes under first and subsequent stroke currents.

A recently introduced technique called improved multi-conductor transmission line (MTL) is simplified for grounding electrodes buried in both-affected soils.

The simulation results show that including the two effects simultaneously in highly resistive soils under high-valued subsequent stroke current is recommended. Otherwise, simultaneous effects can be disregard.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, there is no research on sensitivity analyses for the simultaneous inclusion of the two effects on the effective length and the induced voltage on the soil surface. To this end, the simplified MTL is applied to the grounding electrodes. The simulation results show that the computational efficiency in comparison with previous methods is, first, considerably increased. Second, the simultaneous effects result in decreasing the soil surface voltage with respect to situations where either ionization or dispersion is taken into account (single-affected soils). In other words, the performance of grounding systems is improved. Third, the effective length in both-affected soil is has a middle value with respect to the single-affected soil. Such findings practically and financially are of importance.

Tall towers have a high potential for being struck by lightning which is a major source of electromagnetic radiation with adverse effects on electric, electronic and telecommunication instruments. The paper aims to present an accurate method for predicting the radiated electromagnetic fields and current distribution along the lightning channel and the tower hit by the lightning.

The electromagnetic model is utilized to model the lightning channel and the tower is represented by lossy conducting wires. The finite difference time domain (FDTD) method is used to solve for the governing Maxwell’s equations. Due to the large computational space, the FDTD code is paralleled between several computer processors. To enhance the efficiency of the code, a non-uniform mesh is used, reducing the mesh length in the air-ground interface. For model evaluation, simulated current distribution along the lightning channel and tower, and the radiated electromagnetic fields are compared with the measurement data and those obtained using the engineering models.

The proposed modeling technique has proved to be more accurate than the conventional methods, particularly in the prediction of current distribution along the tall tower and the vertical component of the radiated electric field.

The main feature of the proposed technique is its ability to consider the impact of metallic structures in a large space around lightning channel on the predicted radiated electromagnetic fields, having no concern on computer memory requirements.