A method for the interpretation of soil structure in the vicinity of grounding system

In generally, soil resistivity measurements should be made in the absence of buried metallic. When it is necessary to evaluate the performance of an existing grounding system, soil resistivity have to be measured in the vicinity of grounding system. For example, when to do the grounding impedance measurement with short electrode wire, the location of potential probe must be precise positioning. A number of computer program can do this job based on a accurate soil structure, but how to get the accurate soil structure in the vicinity of grounding system is not easy. In this paper, we proposed a method to calculate this problem combined with FEM and GA. A relationship of apparent resistivity ρ_a and electrode spacing a in the vicinity of grounding systems can be got by FEM. The optimization methodology applying in soil interpretation is genetic algorithm, which don't need explicit analytical expression of apparent resistivity ρ_a and electrode spacing a.