16th International Conference on Boundary Element Methods, 1994, Southampton, England[Abstract] Grounding systems are designed to preserve human safety and grant
the integrity of equipments under fault conditions. To achieve these goals,
the equivalent electrical resistance of the system must be low enough to
ensure that fault currents dissipate (mainly) through the grounding electrode into the earth, while maximum potential gradients between close
points on the earth surface must be kept under certain tolerances (step
and touch voltages) [1,2].
In this paper, we present a Boundary Element approach for the numerical computation of grounding systems. In this general framework,
former intuitive widespread techniques (such as the Average Potential
Method) are identified as the result of specific choices for the test and
trial functions, while the unexpected anomalous asymptotic behaviour of
these kind of methods [3] is mathematically explained as the result of
suitable assumptions introduced in the BEM formulation to reduce computational cost. On the other hand, the use of high order elements allow to
increase accuracy, while computing time is drastically reduced by means
of new analytical integration techniques. Finally, an application example
to a real problem is presented
