Impact of surge arrester number and placement on reliability and lightning overvoltage level in high voltage substations

Surge arresters are the most critical equipment for protecting high voltage substations. They play an important role in substations for limiting switching and lightning surges and diverting these surges to ground. On the other hand, surge arrester number and placement for high voltage substations can be determined based on some evaluations in the designing process of substations. Surge arresters can be placed on the both ends of substations, transformers, circuit breakers, reactors, capacitors and also high long bus-bars and etc. Therefore, failure of arresters during overvoltage can put substations in risk condition. Moreover, surge arresters may be inclined to be short circuit during normal operation condition due to ageing process and/or improper quality. This paper attempts to assess reliability of three common substation configurations namely: (1) one breaker and a half; (2) double-bus double-breaker; and (3) ring bus-bar in different placement of surge arresters. At first, maximum voltages on equipment are calculated in different lightning stroke locations through simulation in EMTP-RV. Studies without surge arrester and the presence of surge arrester in different locations are analyzed and compared. Then surge arrester's placement impacts on the substations reliability indices are calculated in normal operating condition and overvoltage condition by minimal cut set method and simulation results. Analytical studies reveal that surge arrester can increase substations reliability. But for low annual number of lightning stroke, substation reliability may decrease. Also increasing surge arrester number more than substation need reduces reliability.