On the Evaluation of the Voltage Rise on Transmission Line Tower Struck by Lightning Using Electromagnetic and Circuit-Based Analyses

Abstract

Voltage and current waveforms of transmission lines struck by lightning are calculated for use in back flashover analysis. Calculation by using equivalent circuits is the general practice, however, there are limited experimental results for reference to evaluate validity of developed equivalent circuits under various line conditions. Calculation results by numerical electromagnetic analysis can be used as references if they are proved reliable. In this paper, the voltage rises at a model of a 154 kV transmission line hit by lightning is calculated by Method of Moments (MoM) and FDTD for comparison. They solve Maxwell's equations by using different algorithms, so, if the calculated results by these methods reasonably agree under various line conditions, the results of these numerical analyses are regarded reliable. The calculated voltage and current waveforms by the two numerical methods agree well under a variety of footing resistance of transmission towers, thus the authors conclude that the calculated results by FDTD or MoM can be employed as references to evaluate validity of circuit models for back flashover analyses. Thus, the results calculated by circuit analysis are compared with those calculated by FDTD. The multistory tower model (Ishii model) better reproduces the voltage waveforms in a wide range of the footing resistance than simple circuit models of a tower, and can be easily tuned for further accuracy.