Development of a CAD system based on a BEM approach for earthing grids in stratified soils

Abstract

[Abstract] The design of safe earthing systems is esential to assure the security of the persons as well as the protection of the equipment and the continuity of the power supply. For the attainment of these aims, it is necesary to compute the equivalent electrical resistance of the system and the potential distribution on earth surface when a fault condition occurs. In the last years, we have proposed a numerical approach based on the Boundary Element Method for the earthing analysis in uniform and homogeneous soils. This formulation has been succesfully applied to the analysis of several grounding grids in real electrical instalations. In this paper we present the generalization of this BE formulation for the grounding systems embedded in layered soils and the development of a CAD system based on it. The feasibility of this BEM approach is demostrated and it is applied to a frequent practical case of an earthing system in layered soil.