ASU Electronic Theses and Dissertations
This collection includes most of the ASU Theses and Dissertations from 2011 to present. ASU Theses and Dissertations are available in downloadable PDF format; however, a small percentage of items are under embargo. Information about the dissertations/theses includes degree information, committee members, an abstract, supporting data or media.
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Dissertations and Theses granted by Arizona State University are archived and made available through a joint effort of the ASU Graduate College and the ASU Libraries. For more information or questions about this collection contact or visit the Digital Repository ETD Library Guide or contact the ASU Graduate College at gradformat@asu.edu.
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- All Subjects: Electric currents--Grounding.
To ensure accuracy and personnel safety, a two-layer soil model is applied instead of the uniform soil model in this research. Some soil model parameters are needed for the two-layer soil model, namely upper-layer resistivity, lower-layer resistivity and upper-layer thickness. Since the ground grid safety requirement is considered under the earth fault, the value of fault current and fault duration time are also needed.
After all these parameters are obtained, a Resistance Matrix method is applied to calculate the mutual and self resistance between conductor segments on both the horizontal and vertical direction. By using a matrix equation of the relationship of mutual and self resistance and unit current of the conductor segments, the ground grid rise can be calculated. Green's functions are applied to calculate the earth potential at a certain point produced by horizontal or vertical line of current. Furthermore, the three basic ground grid safety requirement quantities: the mesh touch potential in the worst case point can be obtained from the earth potential and ground grid rise; the step potential can be obtained from two points' earth potential difference; the grid resistance can be obtained from ground grid rise and fault current.
Finally, in order to achieve ground grid optimization problem more accurate and efficient, which includes the number of meshes in the horizontal grid and the number of vertical rods, a novel two-step hybrid genetic algorithm-pattern search (GA-PS) optimization method is developed. The Genetic Algorithm (GA) is used first to search for an approximate starting point, which is used by the Pattern Search (PS) algorithm to find the final optimal result. This developed application provides an optimal grid design meeting all safety constraints. In the cause of the accuracy of the application, the touch potential, step potential, ground potential rise and grid resistance are compared with these produced by the industry standard application WinIGS and some theoretical ground grid model.
In summary, the developed application can solve the ground grid optimization problem with the accurate ground grid modeling method and a hybrid two-step optimization method.
In the process of ground grid optimization, the touch potential and the step potential are introduced as nonlinear constraints in a two layer soil model whose parameters are set by the user. To obtain an accurate expression for these nonlinear constraints, the ground grid is discretized by using a ground-conductor (and ground-rod) segmentation method that breaks each conductor into reasonable-size segments. The leakage current on each segment and the ground potential rise (GPR) are calculated by solving a matrix equation involving the mutual resistance matrix. After the leakage current on each segment is obtained, the touch potential and the step potential can be calculated using the superposition principle.
A genetic algorithm is used in the optimization of the ground grid and a pattern search algorithm is used to accelerate the convergence. To verify the accuracy of the application, the touch potential and the step potential calculated by the MATLAB application are compared with those calculated by the commercialized grounding system analysis software, WinIGS.
The user's manual of the optimal ground grid application is also presented in this work.