Thunderstorms Days Mapping In Saudi Arabia for Better Lightning Protection Design

摘要

Lightning has been one of the important problems for insulation design of power systems and it is still the main cause of outages of transmission and distribution lines. Lightning caused outages can be reduced by lightning protection devices such as ground wires and lightning arresters. The main objective of this research is to establish and develop the actual annual and seasonal maps of Iskruanic level (Thunders days, Td/yr) for the country, which is commonly used in the design of lightning protection devices. A new annual thunder day maps for Saudi Arabia are presented.. The distribution of thunderstorms over the country is analyzed in terms of the main factors that are required for determining lightning performances of transmission lines. Estimating the lightning performance of transmission lines contains many uncertainties. Thunderstorm days (Td/yr) obtained for Saudi Arabia is also uncertain in some areas of the country specifically those where lightning strikes are more likely to occur. The results of what has been established in this paper are based on data and records available on lightning incidence in Saudi Arabia by the Presidency of Metrology and Environment (PME), and have been validated with other sources. Such information is very valuable along with other parameters for the entire engineers of transmission and distribution lines to optimum design of lightning protection systems. This paper presents a comparative studies used to determine the lightning backflashovers level on 230kV transmission lines utilized by Saudi Electric Company (SEC) in Saudi Arabia, using two well known approaches CIGRE, and the simplified method.