What is Earthing Design?
The risk of getting affected from fault current can be eliminated by installing a perfect earthing system and as per the standard equations which should be utilized in the design of earthing system to get desired results.
Designing Parameters to Achieve Desired Results are Listed Below:
i. Soil Resistivity.
ii. Fault Current.
iii. Available Area (To conduct earthing design in given area).
To build a precise earthing design by performing accurate calculation it is compulsory to design safe system so that both the equipment as well as the operator will not be harmed.
As per IEE80 standard there are two fundamental objectives for earthing design calculation which are given below:
i. To stimulate entitle to import electric currents into the earth under as usual and fault circumstances without declining any performing and equipment limits or unfortunately affecting attentiveness of accommodation.
ii. To reduce the vulnerability of a person in the proximity of grounded accommodation being unprotected to the risk of fault-finding electric shock.
As we know that there are many challenges that comes whenever it is about earthing design. Some of the main challenges in earthing are- Area Constraints, High soil resistivity, unavailability of accurate calculation tools, Limitations of Soil Analysis. It is not possible to cope up with all these challenges by using manual excel calculations as they have many limitations. To cater all these challenges, advanced and accurate computer aided software like ETAP/ CDEGS shall be used to do the calculations on the next level.
Considering Facts for Perfect Earthing Designing are as Follows:
i. Step Voltage.
ii. Touch Voltage.
iii. Ground Potential Rise.
iv. Earth Resistance
Also, by utilizing the CDEGS software the real time analysis can be accomplished easily along with design validation feature. With this software, you will be able to validate your design with the help of software generated reports and 3D graphical view for step and touch potential. Also, it works on real time soil conditions by analyzing the soil structure of the location and gives you the accurate result without any over designing and under designing.
Hence, we conclude that the earthing calculation requires a deep study of IEEE 80 & IS 3043 standards. And also, manual calculations are not sufficient to achieve the results in higher soil resistivity areas or where the availability of area is restricted so in that situation a detailed soil analysis is important. Because soil is varying in nature, it is having multi-layers horizontally as well as vertically, hence to achieve better results a deep analysis is required which is possible only with CDEGS Software.
