Analysis of Lightning Surge Characteristics for Transmission Towers

Lightning performance of transmission lines is an important issue of major interest for electric utility companies. Now a days, with the increasing requirement for power quality, this matter has been deserving even more attention. In some research reduced scale has been taken into account for analysis as it is better for understanding and also for simulation. But usually in real life, actual tower subjected to lightning. So, it is needed to analysis the surge characteristics of actual tower when subjected to lighting. That is why the author simulates an actual tower to obtain the surge characteristics phenomena. In this case three-phase conductors and earth wires have been taken into analysis. The apparent characteristics of a tower may be influenced by the presence of an earth wire. However this issue has been paid attention in the modeling of a tower for the Numerical Electromagnetic Code (NEC-2) simulations. In this research, the surge characteristics of an earth-wired tower as well as phase conductors of the tower struck by lightning are studied with the help of NEC-2 in case of direct and indirect stroke.