Designing for Disaster

Abstract

Electromagnetic transients are the tidal waves of electric power systems. These momentary voltage surges generally lasting only fractions of a second can be powerful enough to disrupt normal operations and even cause serious damage to major pieces of equipment, such as transformers. Created by lightning, line faults, substation switching functions, and other sudden events along a utility network, transients must be taken into account both in choosing equipment ratings for a power system and in setting its operating parameters. Like the builders of a seawall that must withstand the highest expected waves from the ocean, engineers trying to guard against damage from transients face an extraordinary design task. Most of the huge computer simulation codes related to power systems either model steady-state conditions or deal with system stability problems. The analysis of electromagnetic transients, on the other hand, requires a much more detailed examination of how some critical portion of a power system will react to conditions that can change greatly in microseconds. For many years, simulation of transient effects was performed by special-purpose analog computers called transient network analyzers (TNAs). These machines, which are still in use, recreate a portion of the power system in miniature, complete with voltage sources representing generators and various kinds of capacitive or inductive loads. TNAs are generally adequate but relatively inflexible, tedious to set up, and cumbersome to use. Once a system configuration is modeled, many simulations can be performed. Given the need to manually reconfigure TNA circuits to represent changes in a system, however, the analyzers can also be quite expensive to use. During the late 1960s, Herman Dommel of the Bonneville