abstract: Substation ground system insures safety of personnel, which deserves considerable attentions. Basic substation safety requirement quantities include ground grid resistance, mesh touch potential and step potential, moreover, optimal design of a substation ground system should include both safety concerns and ground grid construction cost. In the purpose of optimal designing the ground grid in the accurate and efficient way, an application package coded in MATLAB is developed and its core algorithm and main features are introduced in this work. To ensure accuracy and personnel safety, a two-layer soil model is applied instead of the uniform soil model in this research. Some soil model parameters are needed for the two-layer soil model, namely upper-layer resistivity, lower-layer resistivity and upper-layer thickness. Since the ground grid safety requirement is considered under the earth fault, the value of fault current and fault duration time are also needed. After all these parameters are obtained, a Resistance Matrix method is applied to calculate the mutual and self resistance between conductor segments on both the horizontal and vertical direction. By using a matrix equation of the relationship of mutual and self resistance and unit current of the conductor segments, the ground grid rise can be calculated. Green's functions are applied to calculate the earth potential at a certain point produced by horizontal or vertical line of current. Furthermore, the three basic ground grid safety requirement quantities: the mesh touch potential in the worst case point can be obtained from the earth potential and ground grid rise; the step potential can be obtained from two points' earth potential difference; the grid resistance can be obtained from ground grid rise and fault current. Finally, in order to achieve ground grid optimization problem more accurate and efficient, which includes the number of meshes in the horizontal grid and the number of vertical rods, a novel two-step hybrid genetic algorithm-pattern search (GA-PS) optimization method is developed. The Genetic Algorithm (GA) is used first to search for an approximate starting point, which is used by the Pattern Search (PS) algorithm to find the final optimal result. This developed application provides an optimal grid design meeting all safety constraints. In the cause of the accuracy of the application, the touch potential, step potential, ground potential rise and grid resistance are compared with these produced by the industry standard application WinIGS and some theoretical ground grid model. In summary, the developed application can solve the ground grid optimization problem with the accurate ground grid modeling method and a hybrid two-step optimization method. / Dissertation/Thesis / Masters Thesis Electrical Engineering 2014