A study of human safety against lightning considering the grounding system and the evaluation of the associated parameters

• The work presents a contribution to the study of human safety against lightning.
• We investigate the influence of soils properties associated to a grounding system.
• The study considers a representative human body composed by electric circuits.
• The step, contact and transferred potentials mechanism are investigated.
• The current and the generated energy passing through the heart are evaluated.

This paper presents a study about the influence of different types of soils and surge wave characteristics in terms of human safety. The study is focused on the step, contact and transferred potentials generated by a lightning striking a grounding system and the produced potential gradients that a person could be exposed to. Initially, an introduction about the subject is made. After that, some important aspects about the grounding systems and human body representation are presented followed by a discussion regarding to the survivability threshold and the model parameterization. A Transmission Line Modeling Method and a circuit based model are used to represent the grounding system and the human body. Several simulations were performed in order to analyze the behavior of the current passing through the heart. It was found that soils with different properties do not affect the possible harmful currents considering the step potential mechanism. On the other hand, in the case of contact and transferred potentials, the soil characteristics have significant influence in the survivability threshold.