Abstract
Previous analysis of the lightning response of wind turbine grounding systems has often considered only one unit. This paper investigates the impulse and low-frequency performance of isolated and interconnected grounding systems of wind turbines, subjected to lightning currents representative of first and subsequent negative downward strokes and return strokes associated with upward negative flashes. The system behavior is studied for different lengths of interconnecting conductor between adjacent grounding systems and for distinct values of soil resistivity considering frequency-dependent soil parameters. It is shown that in the case of lightning currents with shorter front-times, the interconnection improves the impulse response of grounding, reducing the GPR peak, only for soils of higher resistivity, whereas in the case of currents with longer front-times, the interconnecting improves the impulse response in all cases. The relative improvement of the impulse response when the adjacent grounding systems are interconnected becomes more significant with the increase of the soil resistivity. In all cases, interconnecting the grounding systems strongly reduces the low-frequency grounding resistance seen by each individual wind turbine earth termination.
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