Analysis of the response to a lightning strike of a towers cascade equipped with its grounding systems

This paper presents an analysis of the response to a direct and indirect lightning strike of a transmission line towers cascade using a direct time domain approach based on the corresponding transmission lines equations and finite difference time domain (FDTD) method. The proposed work deals with a real case of towers being connected by ground wires and equipped with grounding systems with different topologies (vertical or horizontal conductor buried in the ground). In particular, this work realistically represents the tower geometry and accounts for the propagation phenomena along the tower and between the towers. The analysis carried out in time domain deals with rather complex electrical devices (towers, ground wires and grounding systems), but at the same time requires very low computational cost and also provides relatively simple implementation. Some illustrative computational examples related to some engineering applications are given in the paper.