Computer Simulation of Grounding Applications

Computer simulation of grounding applications are important for power generation and distribution. INTEGRATED’s proprietary Boundary Element Method (BEM) solver simulates various types of grounding scenarios very efficiently, especially in the HVDC domain of power/energy industries and in applications involving open regions for electromagnetic field computations.

Below is a case, where INTEGRATED’s COULOMB has been used to simulate a HVDC grounding system. The model consists of 648 volumes, which have been assigned specific conductivities. This demonstrates the software’s capability of assigning and managing materials with various conductivity values. COULOMB is the industry standard program to solve conductivity mode problems for electric field analysis. The HV electrode shown in blue (center) is placed in the central part of the first layer and is assigned a voltage of 400 kV. The layers have been modeled as per the numbers inscribed vertically on the left with their specific conductivity values assigned to them. These values are made available from geological surveys of earth samples. The radius of the complete cylinder is two kilometers with approximately an equivalent height. This model takes less than 15 minutes to solve on a 64-bit Windows dual core computer provided the RAM available is 24 GB or more.

Read full article in the Transformers Special Edition 2021.