In Slovenia, most high-voltage (HV) installations (switchgear, transformer substations, distribution transformer substations) are still built using air-insulated technology. This applies almost exclusively to voltage levels of 220 kV and 400 kV, but also prevails in installations of voltage level of 110 kV.
In order to determine the mechanical characteristics of all the equipment needed for the construction of air-insulated installations and for the construction of supporting structures and foundations on which HV equipment is installed, it is necessary to identify and calculate the loads to which the listed elements are exposed in normal and extraordinary conditions.
While tubular conductors are increasingly being used for busbars, stranded conductors are still mostly used for connections between HV devices for various reasons. In addition to larger elements such as transformation and compensation devices, typical HV devices installed in distribution and transformer substations are circuit breakers, disconnectors, voltage and current transformers, support insulators and surge arresters.
In this paper, we focus on identifying and determining the forces that can act on HV devices during operation and on the structural and building elements on which the equipment is installed. In addition to the forces that occur in stationary operating conditions, the mechanical effects of exceptional phenomena that may occur during operation are relevant for determining the mechanical inertia of the equipment and related structural and building elements. Among these, in addition to earthquakes, we also count forces on HV equipment due to the effect of high electromagnetic fields between short circuits. It turned out that these are authoritative for the required mechanical characteristics of equipment and constructions.
The aim of this paper is to create a software tool for calculating the loads of HV equipment. Already available software among other things, enables the calculation of forces in stationary and extraordinary situations, but it requires data that the designer does not yet have at his disposal when planning the HV installations. The design process would be significantly facilitated by a tool, that would provide data in the early stages of design, with the help of which we design the installations by choosing the appropriate HV equipment. Therefore, the design process does not need to be carried out iteratively or it would only be necessary in exceptional cases, for example, if it post festum turns out, that the device does not meet the requirements. For practical reasons, we implemented the mentioned software tool in the VBA Excel environment. The calculation results were compared with those obtained with the Primtech 3D program. We estimate that the comparability of the results confirms the adequacy of the implementation of our software tool.
|