Analysis of Grading Ring Design Parameters and Heat Sink Numbers Effect on Voltage Distribution and Leakage Current in Metal Oxide Surge Arrester

Metal oxide surge arresters (ZNO) are used widely in power system to protect equipments from over voltages. Non uniform potential distribution leads to the depressed service life and low safe reliability, so grading ring is applied on HV surge arrester order to uniform the electric field distribution. One of the problems of arresters is leakage current in power frequency that different parameters such as internal structure of varistors, heat sinks, grading ring can be influence on leakage current. In this paper Maxwell and EMTP/ATP software has been applied to calculate the electric field, voltage distribution and leakage current in a high voltage surge arrester. First Maxwell is used to calculate the electric field and voltage distribution of a 230 kV surge arrester with and without grading ring. Then equivalent circuit of surge arrester has been achieved by applying Maxwell software for 230 kV surge arrester and extracting stray capacitances. The derived equivalent circuit has been simulated in EMTP/ATP software for evaluation of leakage current. Also in this work, the effect of grading ring dimensions and number of heat sinks on leakage current variation has been investigated. Results show grading ring dimension and heat sinks number impact on arrester leakage current.