The aim of this paper is to calculate accurately the grounding performance of an unbounded grounding system under high-magnitude fault current.In this work,a finite element model is presented to compute the characteristic parameters of the grounding system in frequency domain.The ionization phenomenon in the soil surrounding the grounding electrode is taken into account by setting the resistivity of every soil element while the resistivity of each element is varying with the electric field intensity;not a priori hypothesis on the geometrical shape of the ionized region around the electrodes has to be enforced.Open boundaries of the grounding system are represented by introducing a spatial transformation formulation,which translates the semi-infinite space into the finite space without shortening the domain as in the traditional approach.The suggested modeling is validated by comparison of the calculated results,which are laid out for grounding rod and grounding grid,with experimental and simulation results found in literature.