Experimental study on lightning surge response of 500-kV transmission tower with overhead lines

This paper presents the measurement of the lightning surge response of a 500-kV transmission tower with overhead lines including ground wires and phase wires. A number of experimental studies on the lightning surge response of transmission towers have been carried out using freestanding structures such as scale models or actual transmission towers. However, these experiments have ignored the effects of transient electromagnetic coupling among the injection current, the overhead lines, and the tower. This paper reports a new method of measurement considering the arrangement of an actual tower and overhead lines. It is clearly shown that the measured voltage waveform across insulator strings at each crossarm depends on the direction of the injection current. Moreover, the measured current value flowing into the ground wires varies with the direction of the injection current. These results predict that the surge response of a transmission tower depends on the direction of the return stroke current. This is important for the modeling of towers with overhead lines and the estimation of the lightning performance of transmission systems under a lightning stroke.