Contribution to the study of human safety against lightning considering the grounding system influence and the variations of the associated parameters

This paper presents a study about the influence of the 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 reaching a grounding system and the produced potential gradients that a person could be exposed to. A Transmission Line Modeling Method and a circuit based model are used to represent the grounding system and the human body. Several simulations were preformed in order to evaluate the behavior of the current passing through the heart.