A new evolutionary method for designing grounding grids by touch voltage control

The author proposes a nested evolutionary method making use of the potentialities of the genetic algorithms to design a grounding grid having a pre-arranged number of conductors. In all the designing steps the control is assigned to the maximum touch voltage whose value must be below the safety values referred to in IEEE standards. This maximum touch voltage is calculated by another method which is based on the genetic algorithms, too. The proposed evolutionary method allows us to design unequally spaced grounding grids that produce a more uniform touch voltage distribution than the equally spaced grounding grids.