An Efficient Method for Calculating the Lightning Electromagnetic Field Over Perfectly Conducting Ground

Abstract

In the implementation of the Cooray–Rubinstein formula, the calculation of a lightning electromagnetic field over perfectly conducting ground accounted for most of the computation time. Commonly, evaluating the ideal lightning electromagnetic field is based on the numerical integration method. In practice, only a sufficiently small discretization step is essential to get an accurate result, which leads to a relatively large number of calculations and results in a lengthy computation time. Besides, the programming is relatively complicated because the propagation of the lightning current along the channel must be considered. In order to increase the efficiency and simplify the programming, an improved method is proposed in this paper. In this method, the evaluation of the ideal lightning electromagnetic field is equated with a summation of analytical formulae and a simple integral operation, so it would be more efficient and easily programmed. The validation of the proposed method is demonstrated by some simulation examples.