Lightning Surge Analysis Including Diagonal Wires Based on the FDTD Method

This paper presents an arbitrary diagonal wire on an rectangular surface composing a cubic cell in an electromagnetic analysis based on the orthogonal FDTD (Finite-Difference Time-Domain) Algorithm. One of the numerical electromagnetic analyzing algorithms is the FDTD method based on Maxwell’s equation. The basic FDTD method divides the analyzed space into cubic cells and directly calculates the electrical and magnetic fields of the cells by discretizing the Maxwell’s equation of electromagnetic fields, where the derivatives with respect to time and space are replaced by a numerical difference. The development of computer performance brings about an actual execution of the FDTD method on a usual personal computer recently.

In dealing with a diagonal and curved wire, the boundaries of which do not coincide with the finite-difference grid lines, the staircase approximation has been commonly used. However, the approximation causes the large error in a resonant frequency and a propagation time of a system including the diagonal or curved wire. The proposed method can express a diagonal and curved wires on a rectangular surface composing a cubic cell by transforming the general integral form of Maxwell’s equation to the different integral form around the wires. This proposed method is also useful to calculate surge propagation on an arbitrary three-dimensional skeleton structure including a diagonal or curved grid such as a tower model and so on.