A Recursive Formula for the Evaluation of Earth Return Impedance on Buried Cables

Abstract

This paper presents an alternative solution based on infinite series for the accurate and efficient evaluation of cable earth return impedances. This method uses Wedepohl and Wilcox's transformation to decompose Pollaczek's integral in a set of Bessel functions and a definite integral. The main feature of Bessel functions is that they are easy to compute in modern mathematical software tools such as Matlab. The main contributions of this paper are the approximation of the definite integral by an infinite series, since it does not have analytical solution; and its numerical solution by means of a recursive formula. The accuracy and efficiency of this recursive formula is compared against the numerical integration method for a broad range of frequencies and cable configurations. Finally, the proposed method is used as a subroutine for cable parameter calculation in the inverse Numerical Laplace Transform (NLT) to obtain accurate transient responses in the time domain.