Impedance Behavior of Earth Enhancing Compound Under Lightning Transient Conditions

This study was aimed at finding the performance of commercially available earth enhancing compound (EEC) under lightning conditions. Further to that, this is an extension of a previous study conducted by the same authors referring to the same EEC. The selected material seems to perform impressively under lightning conditions passing considerably large current values.The prepared EEC mixture and the setup was tested under dry conditions and exhibited low dynamic impedance characteristics for lightning impulse voltages. Ten-stage Marx-generator was used for the experiment, and due to high conductive nature of the material, HV supply between the sample was unable to increase more than few kV. Thus the 12 cm gap inside the material was complemented with an external air gap of 90 cm. The study was a comparison between “air-gap breakdown” and “air-gap plus materialgap breakdown”. The results confirmed a low impedance characteristic for the selected EEC and suggested a very low electric field inside the material gap. An approximate value for the impedance of the test setup was calculated from the collected data. A time window was selected during the steady current discharge appeared just after the point of current peak and the impedance curves for both experiments were compared at a previously defined point at the time axis. The impedance value for EEC setup was estimated to be in the region of 1 - 2 Ω.