Feasibility Studies for Removing Surge Arresters from Inessential Nodes of Distribution System Through Protective Radius

The expansion and development of urban distribution networks and application of distribution transformers close to each other lead to the excessive allocation of surge arresters. Failures rate and breakdowns of surge arresters in the traditional routine are highly effective on unwanted outages. Therefore, this paper proposes a method to reduce the number of surge arresters as well as maintaining network’s overvoltage protection. This is achieved with the search maximum value of protection radius for least in-service arresters. Due to numerous states of lightning strikes occurrence, a meta-heuristic search method is applied. Search seek maximum radius in which arrester have the ability to limit overvoltage at the event of a direct stroke at the distribution line. Furthermore, an automatic data exchange between MATLAB and DIGSILENT is used. Simultaneous use of two software enables proper transients analysis of the power system in an extensive search space.