Abstract
When lightning strikes the tower of a cellular phone base station or other such facilities, power and communication equipments in the vicinity of the tower may suffer extensive damages due to the lightning current flowing backward from the grounding system of the tower. The use of a deeply buried grounding electrode has been proposed recently to suppress such back flow current and a potential rise in the vicinity of the tower. The deeply buried grounding electrode is a bare conductor buried deep in the ground that is connected to a lightning rod on the ground by an insulated wire. When lightning strikes the lightning rod, the lightning current is directed to the electrode from which it diffuses to the ground. The deeply buried grounding electrodes have been installed in cellular phone base stations and other such facilities to solve such problems caused by the back flow current and the potential rise. A grounding mesh is usually laid around such base stations as a grounding system for the facilities on the ground. Therefore, it is important to understand the interactions between the deeply buried grounding electrode and the grounding mesh. In this study, experiments on the interactions between a grounding mesh and a deeply buried grounding electrode have been carried out. Additionally, the transient characteristics of the mesh grounding have researched.
