Recommendation for Grounding Systems in Lightning Protection Systems

This paper presents some practical recommendations to design the grounding systems as part of the integral protection system against lightning. These recommendations are given taking into account the results of academic software developed based on hybrid electromagnetic method and method of moments. This paper presents the results of impedance and transient voltage for triangle, wye, counterpoises and mesh configurations. They are presented some recommendation about the use and characteristic of earth electrodes, for example: effective length of counterpoises, where to locate grounding rods, where to connect down conductor in a mesh and presents the potential difference between points on the same grounding electrodes. These recommendations guide the designer in order to get better benefits from the grounding setups without waste money.