Application of meshless methods to the analysis and design of groundingsystems

Analysis and design of grounding systems of electrical installations involves computing the potential distribution in the earth and the equivalent resistance of the system. Several numerical formulations based on the Boundary Element Method have recently been derived for grounding grids embedded in uniform soils and in stratified soils, which feasibility has been demonstrated with its application to large earthing systems in a two-layer soil. In cases of the analysis of grounding systems buried in more stratified soils or heterogeneous, the application of Boundary Element approaches can require a considerable computational effort. On the other hand, the specific geometry of earthing systems in practice (a grid of interconnected buried conductors) precludes the use of standard numerical techniques (such as finite elements or finite differences), since discretization of the domain (the earth) is required and the obtention of sufficiently accurate results should imply unacceptable computing efforts. For these reasons, we have turned our attention to investigate the applicability of numerical formulations based on meshless methods for the grounding analysis. In this paper, a meshless technique based on the Moving Least Square method with a point collocation approach is proposed.