The optimal placement of switching devices on rural medium-voltage systems

• Main Author: Pitamber, Neemesh
• Other Authors: Dingley, Charles
• Format: Dissertation
• Language: English
• Published: University of Cape Town 2014
• Subjects: Electrical Engineering
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/11427/5126

Bibliography: leaves 104-106. === Electricity is supplied to rural areas by radial networks operating for example at 11 or 22 kV. A problem with radial networks is that faults on the feeders result in the loss of electricity supply to all customers if they are not sectionalised. Some radial networks emanating from one feeder from the sub-station may consist of up to 300 km of line, taking into account spurs, which makes fault detection difficult and increases customer outage time. Protective devices such as reclosers, sectionalisers and fuses are place on distribution systems to reduce the number of customers that will not have service at one time or another due to any fault on the system. There do not appear to be clear rules with regard to the placement of these protective devices. With the installed cost of devices such as sectionalisers bieng over fifty thousand rand, this is naturally of concern to a power utility.