Question
Modeling ballast as a coating in MALZ

It is known that MALZ can only deal with buried conductors. It cannot directly model a system which contains aboveground conductors, although equivalent buried components can be used. Computing the conductive component for a rail track using MALZ requires such an approach, since a rail track sits on the ballast above the earth surface. To model this scenario correctly in MALZ, the ballast is represented as the coating of a rail. An equivalent coating resistance is calculated based on the ballast resistivity. To do so, model a piece of rail in MALZ, then adjust the rail coating resistivity until the grounding resistance of the rail, reported by MALZ, equals to the shunt impedance of the ballast for the same length as the rail in the MALZ model. Once the equivalent rail coating resistivity is achieved, a rail can be modeled as a buried coated conductor in any MALZ model for computing the conductive component of AC interference.