Analysis of Conductor Impedances Accounting for Skin Effect and Nonlinear Permeability

It is often necessary to protect sensitive electrical equipment from pulsed electric and magnetic fields. To accomplish this electromagnetic shielding structures similar to Faraday Cages are often implemented. If the equipment is inside a facility that has been reinforced with rebar, the rebar can be used as part of a lighting protection system. Unfortunately, such shields are not perfect and allow electromagnetic fields to be created inside due to discontinuities in the structure, penetrations, and finite conductivity of the shield. In order to perform an analysis of such a structure it is important to first determine the effect of the finite impedance of the conductors used in the shield. In this paper we will discuss the impedances of different cylindrical conductors in the time domain. For a time varying pulse the currents created in the conductor will have different spectral components, which will affect the current density due to skin effects. Many construction materials use iron and different types of steels that have a nonlinear permeability. The nonlinear material can have an effect on the impedance of the conductor depending on the B-H curve. Although closed form solutions exist for the impedances of cylindrical conductors made of linear materials, computational techniques are needed for nonlinear materials. Simulations of such impedances are often technically challenging due to the need for a computational mesh to be able to resolve the skin depths for the different spectral components in the pulse. The results of such simulations in the time domain will be shown and used to determine the impedances of cylindrical conductors for lightning current pulses that have low frequency content