Calculation of lightning transient voltages in cables considering a large industrial site using a FDTD thin wire model

Abstract

An efficient model to include thin wire structures in FDTD is used and validated in a lightning transient study on a buried cable in a realistic industrial site. The model is based on the thin wire formalism of Holland and permits to consider different types of structures: bare wires, single core insulated cables, and single core coaxial cables. The industrial site is composed by a building, a grounding grid, and a buried single core coaxial cable leaving the building. An equivalent electronic equipment is connected to the extremities of the core. A lightning strikes the building, and the currents along the cable (shield and core), as well as the voltage at the extremes are examined. The results were compared with a MoM numerical tool, with good agreement and a significant better performance in terms of computational resources.