Electrical Earthing System Design & Soil Resistivity Testing
What are the procedures for creating an HV Earthing System Design? Also, how might these differ from an LV Earth design?
Firstly, although the principles underpinning HV and LV earthing are similar, the approaches are very different.
The first huge difference is the recognition that HV electrical earthing design is probabilistic in nature. Whereas LV earthing is far less so.
What do I mean?
[Read more…] about Earthing System Design Procedure A Probabilistic ApproachEarthing Standards Update. For the past few years. GreyMatters has been fortunate enough to support the rail electrification and upgrade programmes across the UK for Earthing Design. And maintaining a consistent approach. Across a building programme of this scale. Can be a massive engineering headache for all design teams concerned.
Especially, when Earthing Standards touches on so many disciplines along the way. From civils, OLE (Overhead line equipment), signals, EMC, 3rd parties, ecologies, geophysical. As well as the more obvious general E&B (earthing and bonding).
[Read more…] about November 2018 – Earthing Standards update (Rail)What size conductors should I use? And, is there a simple table I can use for this HV high voltage earthing design project. These are great questions and often asked. This post answers these questions together with the choice of conductor materials and jointing method within a high voltage earthing design project.
Assessing conductor size is entirely dependent on the electrical configuration and the load that the conductor must take. For example, an above-ground bonding conductor serves to transfer current with minimal voltage drop, from A to B. A directly buried conductor has an additional purpose, that of leaking the fault current or voltage into the local geology (as part of an electrode).
[Read more…] about How to Size High Voltage Earthing HV Conductors CorrectlyWe like to think electricity has been around for years, right? It certainly ‘feels’ like we should know all there is to know. But as an earthing designer. The scientific community tells us we humans are not good at time perspective that falls outside our immediate field of vision. No surprises here. But, I thought it would be interesting to add a wider time-perspective to electrical energy, which in turn, might explain WHY so few (relatively) know and understand the process of earthing design, and what an Earthing Designer is all about, i.e. what the earthing designer can deliver.
[Read more…] about Putting electricity in perspective – a view from an earthing designerA number of organisations across the UK recommend a standard earthing design when building smaller scale substations. The key driver behind these is one of cost. Nobody wants to pay more than they have to. For an HV connection using a templated approach to meet Earthing Standards compliance kind of makes sense – or does it?
So, the question is – does installing a standard earthing design meet your obligations under the Electricity at Work regulations?
[Read more…] about Your Standard Earthing Design – Are They Valid Anymore?
