Optimal, Safety, and Economic Design of High Voltage Substations Grounding System

Due to both safety and economic issues¡ exhaustive and optimal design of the grounding system of high voltage substations is one of the most important¡ expensive¡ sensitive¡ and complicated problems of the high voltage substations. In this paper¡ a novel designing method is proposed which consist of seven fundamental steps. The method is based on the ANSI/IEEE Std. 80-2000 standard. Most of the parameters affecting the safety and economic costs are considered as the optimization variables which are set by using smart method. The grounding system is designed by defining an appropriate objective function which contains the essential parameters that affects the relevant cost. Moreover¡ an optimization technique known as random search algorithm is suggested in order to solve the associated nonlinear problems with nonlinear boundary conditions. As a practical case study¡ we implemented the proposed method for designing of the grounding system of a high voltage substation in Taft city and a 230/63 kV high voltage substation. The system was also designed using a usual approach which is based on the ANSI/IEEE Std. 80-2000 standard along with the trial and error method. Our comparison study¡ confirm the superiority of the proposed method from both safety and economic points of view.