An optimal design of substation grounding grid considering economic aspects using particle swarm optimization

Abstract

Design of a safety grounding system is an important part of substation design in power systems. An appropriate designed grounding system ensures the adequate safety for people and protects the installation. Also, due to increasing the electrical equipment price and cost of land, the implementation of grounding system is faced with restrictions. Therefore, the design of optimal substation grounding grid considering the practical limits such as economic aspects is one of the important problem in system designing. This study presents to design an optimal grounding grid considering the economic aspects of designing. In this study, the number and diameters of conductors and rods which can carry the fault current, space between conductors for having the safety factors, the depth of burring the grounding system and investment cost are considered as parameters which affected on total cost of grounding system. Also to conducting the simulation to finding the best parameters of grounding grid to be optimum in all aspects, the Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithm is employed. Finally, the PSO is applied to a typical grounding system in two different scenarios and the results are compared to each other. ©Maxwell Scientific Organization, 2013.