Evaluation of the horizontal electric field of the lightning channel with the fast convergent sommerfeld integral tail

Abstract

Purpose

The electromagnetic field radiated from a lightning channel is the excitation for analyzing the field-to-transmission line coupling problem. The purpose of this paper is to propose a novel efficient approach to evaluate the horizontal electric field of the lightning channel expressed by the generalized Sommerfeld integral.

Design/methodology/approach

The asymptotic integral is extracted from the original one, which actually makes the Sommerfeld integral tail reach its convergence very quickly. To handle the sharp variance around k0, a closed-form integral, which is obtained by replacing the original kernel with an approximated function, is presented in detail. The numerical examples validated the proposed approach in the both frequency and time domain.

Findings

The approach proposed in this paper has been validated by the comparison with results in other papers. The agreement among these results reaches very well, and the approach proposed in this paper is more efficient and easy to implement, especially for the calculation of the tail integral part.

Originality/value

In accordance with the numerical experiments, the proposed approach can be served as a qualified candidate in terms of computational efficiency to evaluate the electromagnetic field generated by the lightning channel.

Citation

Zou, J., Zhou, C., Li, W., Lee, J.-b. and Chang, S. (2013), "Evaluation of the horizontal electric field of the lightning channel with the fast convergent sommerfeld integral tail", COMPEL - The international journal for computation and mathematics in electrical and electronic engineering, Vol. 32 No. 6, pp. 2027-2044. https://doi.org/10.1108/COMPEL-09-2012-0159