A special risk during live-line maintenance

The main purpose of arc protection is the prevention of the initiation of an electric arc, and to decrease the emitted energy of the arc to the lowest possible level. If the hazard is not negligible, personal protective equipment must be used. In case of live-line maintenance (LLM) in high voltage (HV) systems, the use of personal protective equipment against arc is not common, but the chance of the development of an electric arc has to be evaluated in this case, too. During live work in HV systems, the possible appearance of an electric arc means extreme danger; due to the high power, the magnitude of the current of the arc may reach the range of several kiloampers. For this reason, the live-line personnel in the vicinity of the arc suffers extremely high levels of different kind of harmful loads. The main aim of this article is to investigate the possibility of the initialization of an electric arc during HV LLM and to analyze the proper ways of handling this kind of risk.