Increasing Safety in Live Line Maintenance Applying Preventive Lightning Protection

摘要

The service quality and consumers satisfaction are determinant in power supply. Some of the service quality factors can be influenced by live working activities which is the most economical solution. Never seen progress started in low, medium and high voltage level in live line maintenance (LLM). Live working can be executed in principal only by highly qualified workers with specific knowledge, using special tools, devices, outfit and technologies in well defined surroundings. It is the highest importance to abide the safety rules, live working regulations and technological processes. Special attention has to be devoted to safety issues. It is obvious to use the information of lightning detection systems having been built everywhere in the world for increasing safety. According to the standards if any of the workers can see lightning or hear thunder everybody has to stop working if the team works on overhead lines or equipment of electric station that are interconnected to those lines. In these cases the operation is not allowed to be performed or has to be finished as soon as possible. The level of protection is usually not suitable if using primary and/or secondary lightning protection on the aforesaid basis. In recent studies a new approach has been introduced namely preventive lightning protection. The new method is dynamic both in time and space. Dynamic in this case means, the protection is in effect only during thunderstorms in a special area below the cloud. However to recognize the need for the preventive action, the thunderstorm has to be monitored around the object to be protected. In this paper a new application for the usage of preventive lightning protection is presented. The application shows the effectiveness of the new method for large, rather complicated objects and connected systems, too.