OPTIMIZED DESIGN OF GROUNDING OF HYDROPOWER STATION

Abstract

In order to achieve Equipment and personnel protection in Small Hydropower plant, a proper grounding system is needed. This project presents the Optimized design of grounding system of Small Hydropower plant and MATLAB program for calculation of required Parameters. This project is to provide information regarding to safe grounding practices in Hydropower plant design and to establish the safe limits of potential differences under normal and fault conditions. Standard equations are used in the design of grounding system to get desired parameters such as touch and step voltage criteria for safety, earth resistance, system resistance, maximum system current, minimum conductor size and electrode size, maximum fault current level and resistivity of soil. By selecting the proper horizontal conductor size, vertical electrode size and soil resistivity, the best choice of the project for safety is performed. One part of the project mentions the calculation of the desired parameters of 'a Grounding system for different geometries which are simulated by MATLAB program. Some simulated results are evaluated. One of the goals of this project is to provide a safe grounding system of Hydropower plant. An application is proposed for getting the optimum design of grounding systems. The basic design quantities of the grounding systems are the ground resistance (Rg), the ground potential rise (GPR), touch and step voltages. These mentioned quantities depend on the system parameters, which are its side lengths, radius of system conductors and length of vertical rods. The effect of the number of vertical rods, their length, and its position are studied. Here the optimization parameters taken are conductor spacing (D) and number of vertical rods (Nr). Numerical example is introduced to explain the performance of this method and its ability to give valuable information about the system configuration that satisfies optimization. The algorithm and MATLAB program are developed to get the optimized grounding system configuration. The optimization problem is subject to safety constraints related with the maximum allowed touching and step voltages. The methodology selects the optimum system of all possible configurations