Notice of RetractionThe experimental study of spark breakdowns in soil

Notice of Retraction

After careful and considered review of the content of this paper by a duly constituted expert committee, this paper has been found to be in violation of IEEE´s Publication Principles.

We hereby retract the content of this paper. Reasonable effort should be made to remove all past references to this paper.

The presenting author of this paper has the option to appeal this decision by contacting TPII@ieee.org.

The lightning proof grounding is one of the important measures to ensure the safe operation of the transmission lines. The spark breakdowns in soil is the largest deciding factor for which the lightning current discharged by the grounding body. In order to study the quality of spark breakdowns in soil, we mainly experimentally studied on non-uniform electric field and uniform field which simulated by three different conditions which involved needle-plate, rod-plate and semi-circular cylindrical-plate electrode model in the way of capturing images by photographic film. Impulse current generator applied in this trial to analog output lightning current in this paper. The location of film determined by the electric filed distributions of needle-plate and semi-circular cylindrical-plate electrode model through the Ansoft 12 Maxwell software emulation. The experimental results show that when impulse electric current conducted to soil surrounding the grounding body spark discharging would occur. The electric field strength of film position in rod-plate model is below 2.1kV/cm in the way of numerical calculating method, in other words, electric field strength of spark discharge less than half of the theoretical result of breakdown field strength of soil. There are strong and weak discharge channels in spark discharging and the results shooting of the black and white film better than the X-Ray film. The more uniform the distribution of electric filed is around the grounding body, the more uniform the spark discharge chann- l is in soil.