Modeling and simulation of surge arresters for lightning protection of distribution systems

Overvoltage protection systems are necessary to protect power system components against several types of overvoltages. In this paper, protection against overvoltage caused by lightning in 69 kV distribution feeders is addressed. The idea is to describe a methodology for which is possible to model and simulate the performance of a protection system which is composed by surge arresters when exposed mainly to direct lightning incidence. Moreover, typical overvoltage ranges were considered in this paper for the purpose of evaluating the developed protection system. Thus the major contribution of this paper relies upon the assessment of the lightning protection system performance, under different configurations.