Q329 : Effects of Soil Ionization

Question
I understand that MALZ and HIFREQ do not consider the process of soil ionization. Is there a way to compute the effects due to this phenomenon?

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Answer
The MALZ and HIFREQ programs do not directly take soil ionization effects into account. One way to take it into account is to increase the radius of the conductors to a value equal to the "ionization radius". The ionization radius can be computed for every conductor in an initial run, using the nominal values of the conductor radii, by finding the distance from each conductor at which the potential drops below the ionization threshold. If necessary, the process can be repeated iteratively until it stabilizes. This is a rather difficult procedure to implement. Normally, however, the grounding results are not affected too strongly by this effect, since the conductor radius has a rather small impact on the computed GPRs.

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