IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON POWER DELIVERY, VOL. 20, NO.

2, APRIL 2005 1585

Effective Length of Counterpoise

Wire Under Lightning Current
Jinliang He, Senior Member, IEEE, Yanqing Gao, Student Member, IEEE, Rong Zeng, Member, IEEE, Jun Zou,
Xidong Liang, Bo Zhang, Jaebok Lee, and Sughun Chang

Abstract—In a high soil resistivity area, counterpoise wires are
applied to decrease the grounding resistance of tower grounding
devices. If the conductor of counterpoise wire is very long, although
the power frequency grounding resistance of the tower grounding
device is decreased, the lightning protection performance of the
transmission line is still not good. The influences of the length
of grounding electrodes on the lightning transient characteristic
were analyzed. The dynamic and nonlinear effect of soil ionization
around the grounding electrode was considered in the analysis
model of transient characteristics for the grounding electrodes
under lightning impulse. The counterpoise wire has an effective
length when lightning passes through it. When the length of a
grounding electrode exceeds the effective length, the grounding
conductor will not be utilized effectively. The simulating experi-
ments were performed to analyze influences of the length of the
counterpoise wire on the impulse characteristics. The formulae to
calculate the impulse effective lengths of counterpoise wires were
proposed. The model proposed in the paper has been validated by
comparing the numerical results with experimental tests.
Index Terms—Counterpoise wire, effective length, grounding de-
vice, lightning current, simulating experiment, transient charac-
teristic, transmission line.
I. INTRODUCTION
large current can generate soil ionization around the electrode,
makes the impulse response typically nonlinear.
The transient characteristic of a grounding electrode depends
upon many electrical and geometrical parameters, which in-
clude the size and the structure of the grounding device, soil pa-
rameters, impulse current parameters, and the feed point. When
the impulse current with high frequency dissipates in the soil,
the distribution of the electric charge in the space varies with
time. And it shows the feature of the time-variable field.
The engineering design of grounding devices in the protec-
tion against lightning is in dire need of scientific guidance. The
scientific design of a grounding device is not only to enhance
the safety of the system but also to reduce the construction cost
to the minimum.
There have been many papers concentrated on the transient
performance of grounding wires from experimental tests and
simulation analysis [1]–[11]. Pioneering work was conducted
by Sunde in the late 1930s [12], [13].
As mentioned in [14], sometimes the impulse impedance can
be much greater than the power frequency grounding resistance.
In China, in the high soil resistivity area, sometimes long coun-
terpoise wires with conductor lengths of longer than 200 m are

T HE performance of grounding devices under high impulse

current plays an important role in the safe and reliable op-
eration of power systems. The lightning protection effects of
applied to decrease the grounding resistance of tower grounding
devices. Although the power frequency grounding resistances of
those extensive grounding electrodes are reduced, the lightning
transmission lines are related to the impulse characteristics of
protection performance of the transmission line is still not good
grounding devices for transmission-line towers.
because the grounding electrode has “effective length.”
Reducing the impulse grounding resistance of the grounding
Several papers had analyzed the effective length of the
device of a transmission-line tower is a very important measure
grounding electrode [2], [14], [15]. Mazzetti and Vaca [2] an-
to improve the lightning withstand characteristics of transmis-
alyzed the effective length of the grounding electrode, namely
sion lines.
the fraction of the electrode which is sufficient to dissipate the
When a lightning strikes a transmission line, high lightning
larger part of the current, and found the effective length of the
current will flow into the grounding device and dissipate into
grounding wire to be small in low resistivity soil, but increases
soil. As already evidenced by many studies, the characteristic
with soil resistivity. Gupta and Thaper [14] found that only the
of grounding devices subject to high impulse current is dramat-
limited length of the electrode from the point of the feeding
ically different from that at low frequency. Because the induc-
of the current is effective in controlling the impulse grounding
tive behavior of electrodes can become more and more impor-
impedance; they defined this length as effective length. They
tant with respect to its resistive behavior and, in addition, this
proposed an empirical equation to calculate the effective length
of horizontal grounding wire
Manuscript received July 22, 2003; revised December 11, 2003. Paper no.
TPWRD-00387-2003.
J. He, Y. Gao, R. Zeng, J. Zou, and X. Liang, and B. Zhang are with (1)
the Department of Electrical Engineering, Tsinghua University, Beijing
100084, China (e-mail: hejl@tsinghua.edu.cn; zengrong@tsinghua.edu.cn;
gaoyq@emc.eea.tsinghua.edu.cn; zoujun@tsinghua.edu.cn; lxd-dea@ts- where is the soil resistivity, is the wavehead time. The effec-
inghua.edu.cn; shizbcn@tsinghua.edu.cn). tive length is reached when the factor reaches a value
J. Lee and S. Chang are with the Electrical Environment and Transmission of 0.57, where is the power frequency grounding resistance,
Group, Korea Electrotechnology Research Institute, Changwon 641600, Korea
(e-mail: jblee@keri.re.kr; shchang@keri.re.kr). is the wave front time in microseconds, and is the total in-
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TPWRD.2004.838457 ductance of grounding electrode. The coefficient is 1.4 for a
0885-8977/$20.00 © 2005 IEEE
1586
single horizontal electrode fed at one end, 1.55 for a single hori-
zontal electrode fed at the center, and 1.85 for 4-arm star config-
uration fed at the star center, the effective length is for one arm
of center-injection configurations. During their analysis, the soil
ionization phenomenon was not considered. On the other hand,
the influence of the impulse current was not considered too.
The influences of the length of horizontal grounding elec-
trodes on the lightning transient characteristic were analyzed by
simulating calculations and experiments in this paper.
II. SIMULATING ANALYSIS OF EXTENDED
GROUNDING ELECTRODES
A. Puncturing of Soil Under Lightning Current
When a high impulse current excites a grounding electrode,
the transient EM field would be generated in the soil around the
grounding electrode
(2)
where is the electric field strength in the soil, is the soil
resistivity and is the current density in the soil.
When the electric field strength surrounding the grounding
conductor exceeds the critical value of soil breakdown elec-
trical field strength , then the soil breakdown around the
conductor will occur. It will make the potential fall around the
grounding conductor smaller. And it will convert the affected
portion of the soil from an insulator to a conductor. The fall of
potential in the area of soil ionization is often omitted for simpli-
fied simulation. That is to say, the resistivity of the area of soil
ionization is approximately considered to be zero. The radius
of the soil ionization zone surrounding the grounding electrode
can be considered to be the equivalent radius of the electrode
during the transient process.
The transient grounding resistance of a grounding electrode
under impulse current varies with time
(3)
where and are the current and the voltage at the feed
point. The impulse grounding resistance of a grounding elec-
trode is defined as the ratio of the peak value of voltage
developed at the feeding point to the peak value of injected
impulse current [14]
(4)
The defined impulse grounding resistance in (4) does not
have any physical meaning, but if the possible lightning cur-
rent is known, then we can use it to estimate the potential of the
grounding electrode generated by lightning current; this is very
important in lightning protection of the transmission line.
The inductive effect of grounding conductor due to the high
frequency of impulse current would block the current to flow to-
ward the other end of the conductor. This will result in extremely
unequal leakage current distribution along the grounding con-
ductor. The potential distribution along the grounding conductor
is also nonuniform. The ionization degree and equivalent radius
of the ionized soil around every point of the conductor are also
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON POWER DELIVERY, VOL. 20, NO. 2, APRIL 2005
Fig. 1. Shape of the ionized zone around a grounding electrode.
Fig. 2. Modeling of equivalent radii for each segment.
nonuniform. Simulating experiments were proposed to study
the transient performance of grounding devices; the simulation
principle of impulse characteristic of grounding devices was in-
troduced in [16]. During the experiment, photosensitive films
were arranged near the electrode; the tested shape of the ionized
zone around a grounding conductor is illustrated in Fig. 1. The
current density in the point in the soil, where it is much closer
to the feed point, is much larger. So, the ionized zone of the soil
around the conductor is not columniform but pyramidal.
B. Analysis Model of Extending Grounding Electrode
With respect to the complexity of the mathematical model,
the used model in this paper is shown in Fig. 2; the conductor
is represented by a set of cylindrical zones to simulate the soil
ionization phenomena as illustrated in Fig. 1. Obviously, this
assumption is reasonable. in Fig. 2 is the equivalent radius of
the th segment, which is time variable when an impulse current
is injected into the grounding electrode; and is the radius of
the metal conductor. is chosen to be large enough that the
electric field at the edge of the ionized zone is below the critical
value given in [17], which is time variable.
A horizontal grounding electrode buried in the soil under
lightning impulse current can be considered as a distributed net-
work as shown in Fig. 3. For a conductor segment, it is com-
posed of series resistance , series inductance , shunt con-
ductance , and shunt capacitance .
The shunt capacitance and shunt conductance in Fig. 3
of the electrode tied to the diameter of the conductor are re-
lated to the equivalent diameters of every conductor segment,
so they are also time-varying. But we should make a point that
the series resistance and series inductance are not affected
by soil ionization. That can be explained as follows. The direc-
tions of the current flowing into soil on the boundary between
HE et al.: EFFECTIVE LENGTH OF COUNTERPOISE WIRE UNDER LIGHTNING CURRENT
Fig. 3. Representation of a ground electrode with nonuniformly lumped
parameters.
the soil and conductors are normal to the surface of the con-
ductors. The longitudinal current is considered flowing inside
the conductors. The magnetic linkage interlinked with currents
is unvaried with the equivalent diameter of the conductors. Ac-
cording to the physical definition, the series resistance and
series inductance are unvaried with the equivalent diameter
of the grounding conductor. The soil ionization only affects the
shunt capacitance and shunt conductance .
The unit length series resistance, series inductance, shunt ca-
pacitance, and shunt conductance of a grounding conductor are
given in [12], [13], and [18]. If a lightning current is injected into
a grounding conductor, the inner self-inductance of a grounding
conductor can be neglected when comparing it with the external
self-inductance due to the strong skin effect, so the self-induc-
tance of the th segment can be calculated by
(5)
where is the length of the th segment of the grounding elec-
trode and is the permeability of free space.
The resistance of the th segment with the length of can
be calculated by
(6)
where is the soil resistivity, and is the burial depth of the
grounding electrode. The shunt capacitance of the th seg-
ment with a length of and an ionization zone radius of in
an infinite medium is
(7)
where is the permittivity of soil. When the electrode is buried
in a depth of , the capacitance is obtained by assuming two
conductors with a distance of in an infinite medium, which is
based on image theory. So the capacitance of a buried grounding
conductor is equal to
(8)
The shunt conductance in Fig. 3 can be determined by [11]
(9)
1587
Fig. 4. Relationship between impulse ground resistance and the length of the
grounding electrode.
As is well known, the electric-field intensity on the boundary
of the ionized zone is the critical value of soil breakdown.
The equivalent radius for each segment can be obtained by
(10)
where is the current density leaked by the th segment, and
is the current leaked into earth from the th segment.
If the current of each segment in every time step is known,
the equivalent radius can be determined from (10), which is
time-varying. The parameters of each segment can be evaluated
from (7)–(9). Therefore, the impulse response of a grounding
conductor can be obtained with the application of nodal anal-
ysis and a suitable iterative algorithm, which takes into account
the nonlinearity of electrical parameters.
The value used for the critical field gradient in this paper
is 300 kV/m as suggested by Mousa [17].
C. Influence of Grounding Electrode Length on
Impulse Characteristics
The influences of the grounding electrode length on the im-
pulse resistance, when the impulse current (front time and am-
plitude) and soil resistivity are designated, are shown in Fig. 4.
The case is for a grounding electrode with a radius of 10 mm,
buried at a depth of 0.8 m in a soil with resistivity of 100
and relative permittivity of 9. The impulse current, with
2.6/50 standard exponential waveshape and different ampli-
tude is injected at one end of a horizontal grounding electrode.
Clearly, the impulse grounding resistance decreases with the
ground electrode length. But the curveheads toward saturation
when its length reaches a certain value. The reason is that the
inductive effect of the grounding conductor increases with the
increment of the conductor’s length, which will make leakage
current unequally even more along the electrode. This will make
the impulse grounding resistance become saturation when the
length of the grounding electrode increases.
The influence of the length of the electrode on the transient
potential of the lightning current injecting point is shown
in Fig. 5. The burial depth is 0.8 m, and the soil resistivity is
100 m. The impulse current, with 2.6/50 standard expo-
nential waveshape and amplitude , is injected at one
end of a horizontal grounding electrode. When the grounding
electrode is short [ in Fig. 5], the peak value of the
1588
Fig. 5. Influence of the length of a ground electrode on the transient potential
at the lightning injecting point.
Fig. 6. Ionized zones along the grounding electrodes with different lengths:
(a) very short grounding electrode; (b) short grounding electrode; (c) long
grounding electrode.
maximum potential is obviously high. When the grounding elec-
trode is longer than 20 m, the peak values of maximal transient
potentials are almost the same. The time duration reaching the
maximal transient potential for a long electrode is shorter than
that for a short one. When the length of a grounding electrode
exceeds a certain value, the increment of the grounding elec-
trode length will have little effect on the maximal transient po-
tential and the impulse grounding resistance.
III. IONIZATION ZONE OF EXTENDED GROUNDING ELECTRODE
UNDER LIGHTNING CURRENT
From the simulating analysis, the ionization zones of
grounding electrodes with different lengths can be obtained as
illustrated in Fig. 6. When the length of the grounding electrode
is very short, the ionized zone in soil along the electrode is
almost equal as illustrated in Fig. 6(a); with the increment
of the grounding electrode length, the ionized zone along the
electrode has an obvious pyramidal shape as shown in Fig. 6(b);
when the grounding electrode is very long, the current leaked
by the end of the electrode is limited. And the electric field
strength in the soil around the end of the electrode is not strong
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON POWER DELIVERY, VOL. 20, NO. 2, APRIL 2005
Fig. 7. Equivalent radii of the ionized soil zones of an electrode.
Fig. 8. Definition of the effective length of a horizontal grounding electrode.
enough to cause the soil ionization; if it is long enough, there
is not any current reaching the opposite end of the electrode as
shown in Fig. 6(c). That is to say, a grounding electrode has
an impulse effective length. When the length of a grounding
electrode exceeds the impulse effective length, the grounding
conductor will not be utilized effectively.
The equivalent radii of the ionized zones of an electrode in
two terminals and the middle point are shown in Fig. 7, which
change with time. The length of the grounding electrode is 20 m,
and the soil resistivity is 100 , the applied lightning current
is 10 kA, the burial depth of the grounding conductor with radius
of 10 mm is 0.8 m. The ionized zone is very different in different
portions of the electrode.
IV. EFFECTIVE LENGTH OF COUNTERPOISE WIRES
FROM SIMULATING ANALYSIS
Presently, all researchers have realized that a grounding elec-
trode has an effective length under impulse current. In [14], it
is defined as the length of the electrode in which the voltage
wave at the terminal end of the electrode has little effect on the
head end. Another definition by some researchers is the length
of a grounding electrode in which the derivative of the impulse
grounding resistance is smaller than a certain value. This defi-
nition is used in our analysis.
We defined the effective length of the grounding electrode
as the length when the decreased value of grounding resistance
with the increment of the length is smaller than a fixed value.
As shown in Fig. 8, we defined
(11)
HE et al.: EFFECTIVE LENGTH OF COUNTERPOISE WIRE UNDER LIGHTNING CURRENT 1589

Fig. 9. Relation between the effective length and soil resistivity under different
time duration of the wavefront. Fig. 10. Relationship between the impulse grounding resistance and the length
of the horizontal grounding electrode.

where is the included angle of the tangent through point P and

the horizontal direction. is selected in this paper.
The effective length of the grounding electrode is involved
with the soil resistivity , the front time , the magnitude ,
and the feed point of the injected current. When the feed point is
at one end of the grounding electrode, the relation between the
impulse effective length and the soil resistivity for different
front time of impulse current are shown in Fig. 9, where
is 10 kA and the burial depth is 0.8 m.
From Fig. 8, we can observe that the effective length is shorter
for the impulse current with shorter front time. And the effective
length is longer for the soil with higher resistivity. That can be
explained as follows. For the impulse current with the same am- Fig. 11. Influence of the length of the horizontal grounding electrode on the
plitude, the short front time means the big steepness , and impulse resistance in different soil resistivity.
the big steepness means high frequency, which will strengthen
the inductance effect of the grounding conductor. The high resis-
tivity of the soil will block the current flowing into the soil and
force the current moving toward the terminal end of the elec-
trode. So the effective length will be longer for the grounding
electrode buried in soil with higher resistivity.

V. EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS OF EXTENDED

GROUNDING ELECTRODES
The simulation experiments were introduced in [16]. Impulse
experiments using grounding device models were systemati-
cally performed to analyze the influence of different factors
on the impulse characteristics of grounding device models ac-
cording to the simulation principle of impulse characteristics.
During the experiments, soil resistivity was changed in the range
of 100–5103 . Effects of different parameters on impulse
grounding resistance and impulse coefficients of different trans-
mission tower grounding devices were discussed. Formulae to
calculate impulse coefficients and power frequency grounding
resistance of different grounding devices were obtained. The in-
fluence of the length of horizontal grounding electrode on the
impulse resistance in different impulse current was tested and
shown in Fig. 10 and the burial depth is 0.8 m. When the length
of the electrode increases, the impulse grounding resistance de-
creases. When it exceeds a certain value, the impulse grounding
resistance reduces very slowly.
From a lot of experimental results, when the magnitude of
impulse current is fixed at a certain value, the effective length
of the grounding electrode increases, because the portion of the
Fig. 12. Influence of the impulse current on the effective length of the
horizontal electrode.
impulse current flowing into the soil from the electrode end of
the feed point is reduced and then the effective length increases.
The influence of the length of horizontal grounding electrode
on the impulse grounding resistance in different soil resistivity
was tested and shown in Fig. 11. We can observe that the
grounding resistance easily reaches a saturation state if the soil
resistivity is low.
Under the impulse current with waveshape of 2.6/50 , the
effective length of the grounding electrode is shown in Fig. 12.
With the increase of the impulse current, the effective length
decreases. The influence of the soil resistivity on the effective
length of the horizontal electrode is shown in Fig. 13; with the
increase of soil resistivity, the effective length increases.
1590
Fig. 13. Influence of the soil resistivity on the effective length of the horizontal
electrode.
TABLE I
COMPARISON OF GROUNDING ELECTRODE EFFECTIVE LENGTHS IN DIFFERENT
SOIL RESISTIVITY BETWEEN EXPERIMENTAL AND ANALYZED RESULTS
VI. REGRESSIVE FORMULAS TO CALCULATE EFFECTIVE
LENGTH OF COUNTERPOISE WIRES
The data in Table I, derived from analyzing simulating test
results and numerical ones, are the effective length of the
grounding electrodes buried in the soil with different resistivity,
when the impulse current, with 2.6/50- waveform and 10-kA
amplitude is injected at one end. Comparing the data in Table I,
the effective lengths obtained from the simulating calculation
and test are close, but they have differences in comparison
to the results obtained from Gupta’s formula (1), which is
caused by different definitions of effective length and without
consideration of soil ionization and lightning current in (1).
Synthesizing the results of the impulse effective lengths of
the horizontal grounding electrode from numerical analysis and
simulating test, the formula to estimate the impulse effective
length of grounding electrodes is obtained by the least squares
curve fitting methods, when the feed point is at one end
(12)
where is the front time of applied impulse current in , is
the magnitude of the applied impulse current in kA, and is soil
resistivity in . Formula (12) can be used for the burial depth
of larger than 0.8 m. The influence of conductor radius on the
effective length is not obvious, and we can use (12) to estimate
the effective length of counterpoises with different conductor
radius.
From the practical point of view, the configuration of the
counterpoise should be the “center injection” type. For 40-kA
lightning current, the effective lengths of end-injection single
electrode, center-injection single horizontal electrode, and
center-injection four-arm star counterpoise are compared in
Fig. 14, the effective length of center-injection type is for its
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON POWER DELIVERY, VOL. 20, NO. 2, APRIL 2005
Fig. 14 Comparison of the effective lengths of end-injection type and
center-injection-type counterpoise wires.
one-arm. Similarly, from experimental and analyzed results,
the effective length for one arm of center-injecting single
horizontal electrode was concluded as
(13)
and the effective length for one arm of center-injecting four-arm
star counterpoise wires can be calculated by
(14)
VII. CONCLUSION
When high impulse current excites a grounding electrode,
the large current can generate complicated soil ionization sur-
rounding the grounding conductors, which makes the transient
characteristic of the grounding electrode typically nonlinear.
The paper presents an effective method for this problem,
which is a numerical calculation approach based on the circuit
model of distributed time-variable parameters. It accurately
takes into account the nonlinear effects of breakdown in the soil
surrounding the ground conductors. This model can be used to
accurately predict the transient characteristic of the grounding
systems excited by impulse currents.
A grounding electrode has an impulse effective length.
When the length of a grounding electrode exceeds the impulse
effective length, the grounding conductor will not be utilized
effectively.
The influential factors on the effective length of counterpoise
wire are analyzed. The effective length increases with the soil
resistivity and the wavefront time of impulse current, but de-
creases with the magnitude of lightning current. The formulae
to calculate the impulse effective length of counterpoise wires
are provided in this paper. It will be helpful for the technician to
design and reform ground systems against lightning.
The analyzed results have been validated by comparison with
experimental ones.
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Jinliang He (M’02–SM’02) was born in Changsha, China, in 1966. He received
the B.Sc. degree in electrical engineering from Wuhan University of Hydraulic
and Electrical Engineering, China, in 1988, the M.Sc. degree in electrical engi-
neering from Chongqing University, Chongqing China, in 1991, and the Ph.D.
degree in electrical engineering from Tsinghua University, Beijing, China, in
1994, respectively.
Currently, he is Vice Chief of High Voltage Research Institute at Tsinghua
University. He became a Lecturer in the Department of Electrical Engineering
at Tsinghua University in 1994, and an Associate Professor in the same De-
partment in 1996. From 1994 to 1997, he was the head of High Voltage Labo-
ratory at Tsinghua University. He was also a Visiting Scientist in Korea Elec-
trotechnology Research Institute, involved in research on metal oxide varistors
and high voltage polymeric metal oxide surge arresters from 1997 to 1998. In
2001, he was promoted to a Professor at Tsinghua University. His research in-
terests include overvoltages and EMC in power systems and electronic systems,
grounding technology, power apparatus, dielectric material, and power distribu-
tion automation. He is the author of three books and many technical papers.
Dr. He is a senior member of the China Electrotechnology Society, and a
member of the International Compumag Society, the vice chief of China Light-
ning Protection Standardization Technology Committee, and members of Elec-
tromagnetic Interference Protection Committee and Transmission Line Com-
mittee of China Power Electric Society, member of China Surge Arrester Stan-
dardization Technology Committee, members of Overvoltage and Insulation
Coordination Standardization Technology Committee in China Electric Power
Industry.
1591
Yanqing Gao (S’02) received the B.Sc. degree from the Department of Elec-
trical Engineering, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China, in 1999, where he is
currently pursuing the Ph.D. degree in the Department of Electrical Engineering,
Tsinghua University.
His research fields include overvoltage analysis in power system, grounding
technology, and electromagnetic compatibility (EMC).
Rong Zeng (M’02) was born in Shaanxi, China, in 1971. He received the B.Sc.,
M.Eng., and Ph.D. degrees from the Department of Electrical Engineering at
Tsinghua University, Beijing, China, in 1995, 1997, and 1999, respectively.
From 1999 to 2002, he was a Lecturer in the Department of Electrical En-
gineering, Tsinghua University. Currently, he is an Associate Professor in the
Department of Electrical Engineering at Tsinghua University. His research inter-
ests include high voltage technology, grounding technology, power electronics,
and distribution system automation.
Jun Zou was born in Wuhan, P. R. China, in 1971. He received the B.S. and
M.S. degrees from Zhengzhou University in Zhengzhou, Henan Province, in
1994 and 1997, respectively, and the Ph.D. degree from Tsinghua University,
Beijing, China, in July 2001, all in electrical engineering.
His research fields include computational electromagnetics and electromag-
netic compatibility (EMC).
Xidong Liang was born in Jiangyin, China, in 1962. He received the B.Sc.,
M.Sc., and Ph.D. degrees in high-voltage engineering from Tsinghua University,
Beijing, China, in 1984, 1987, and 1991, respectively.
Currently, he is the Dean of the Department of Electrical Engineering, Ts-
inghua University. From 1991 to 1992, he conducted research as a Visiting
Scholar with the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology
(UMIST), Manchester, U.K. Then, he was an Associate Professor with Tsinghua
University in 1993 and a Professor in 1997. His interests include outdoor insula-
tion, composite insulators, and organic outdoor insulation materials, and EMC.
Dr. Liang is the Senior Member of CSEE from 1998 and a Member of CIGRE
SC33 from 2000.
Bo Zhang was born in Datong, China, in 1976. He received the B.Sc. and
Ph.D. degrees in theoretical electrical engineering from the North China Elec-
tric Power University, Baoding, China, in 1998 and 2003, respectively.
He is currently a postdoctoral researcher with the Department of Electrical
Engineering, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China. His research interests include
computational electromagnetics, grounding technology, and EMC in power sys-
tems.
Jaebok Lee was born in Iri, Korea, in 1962. He received the B.Sc., M.Sc., and
Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from Inha University, Inchon, Korea, in
1985, 1987, and 1999, respectively.
Currently, he is a Principle Researcher of the electrical environment and
transmission group of the Korea Electrotechnology Research Institute (KERI),
Changwon, Korea, where he has been since 1987 as a Researcher of the Power
System Insulation Coordination Lab. He was actively involved in electromag-
netic-compatibility (EMC) design of low-voltage power and control systems.
His interests include surge protection and electromagnetic compatibility (EMC)
in power systems and electronic systems and grounding technology.
Dr. Lee is a member of the Korean Institute of Electrical Engineers (KIEE)
and a Korea Chapter member of IEC TC 77A.
Sughun Chang was born in Seoul, Korea, in 1974. He received the B.Sc. and
M.Sc. degrees in electrical engineering from Inha University, Inchon, Korea, in
1996 and 1999, respectively.
Currently, he is with the Korea Electrotechnology Research Institute (KERI),
Changwon, Korea. He was actively involved in electromagnetic-compatibility
(EMC) design of low-voltage power and control system. His research interests
include surge protection and EMC in power systems and electronic systems and
grounding technology.
Mr. Chang is a member of the Korean Institute of Electrical Engineers
(KIEE).