ABSTRACT
The study of the transient behaviour of a wire buried in a lossy half-space, as part of a grounding system, is of great practical importance in electromagnetic pulse protection design. The most important parameter leading to such an analysis is the transient response of the ground electrode or its counterpart in the frequency domain—the input impedance spectrum. The most conventional approach for obtaining the input impedance of the grounding system is usually referred to as the transmission line method (TLM) [1]. However, the TLM approach is valid for long horizontal conductors, but it is not convenient for vertical or interconnected conductors. A more accurate approach, based on integral equations arising from wire antenna theory, was offered by Grčev (see [2] and [3]). Grčev solved the corresponding electric field integral equation (EFIE) by using the point-matching technique. Unfortunately, the method is numerically inefficient, because it requires too long a computational time for the evaluation of the broadband frequency spectrum. In this paper a new finite element procedure for the input impedance calculation is proposed.
