Experimental Study On The Effect Of Soil Resistivity When Treated With Water, Salt And Carbon

Yong, Sing Xing (2015) Experimental Study On The Effect Of Soil Resistivity When Treated With Water, Salt And Carbon. Project Report. UTeM, Melaka, Malaysia. (Submitted)

Text (24 pages) Experimental Study On The Effect Of Soil Resistivity When Treated With Water, Salt And Carbon 24 Pages.pdf Download (441kB)

Abstract

Grounding is a very important aspect in any modern electrical protection system design. Improper grounding may expose the personnel as well as the equipments to unsafe condition. Generally, there are two ways can be used to reduce the earth resistance of a system. The first method is adding more ground rod and the second method is doping on the soil medium. However, the first method is not economically viable when compared to second method which is more effective and cheaper way in reducing the grounding resistance and thereby improve the system performance. Before implementing the grounding system in certain location, the soil characteristic and resistivity in the proposed location must be determined first. This laboratory research aims to test on five different types of soil which includes clay, loam, sandy soil, laterite and top soil at uniform room temperature in order to determine which type of soil will exhibit the lowest resistivity and suitable to be used in grounding system. All five types of soil with the mass of 1 kilogram are treated by water content, salt solution, charcoal and salted charcoal with percentage variation from 2.5% to 30% and 200V DC voltage being applied to BS 1377-3 cylindrical soil resistivity tester. The recorded current is used to obtain resistivity values by applying resistivity equation. Then, the resistivity data is analyzed by using statistical methods which include scatter plot, correlation coefficient analysis and regression analysis. From the scatter plot, the relationships appear to be curvilinear trend and the clay soil is the best soil to be used for grounding installation as it has strongest correlation coefficient. The observations have shown that the resistivity values for all soils will decrease as the water, salt and salted charcoal treatment are increased. However, the relationship between charcoal content and soil resistivity do not show any decrease in resistivity but it appears to increase the resistivity value.

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