Development of IEEE Complaint Software ‘Economical Substation Grounding System Designer’ Using MATLAB GUI Development Environment

Substations as a whole being an important part of the complete power system, grounding system of substations plays a vital role in overall performance of reliable power system. Grounding system of any substation deserves considerable care and attention at design stage, primarily to ensure electrical safety of persons working within or near substations. Looking to such great significance of grounding system design procedure, software which analyzes performance of ground grids of various shapes as per method described in IEEE standard 80 2000 has been developed using MATLAB. Proposed software is able to calculate various performance parameters of grounding system for given input data related to grid geometry, soil and system conditions for all the basic shapes of grounding grid in uniform and two layered soils. Additionally this software can also suggest optimal i.e. most appropriate, safe and costeffective design of the grounding system under given conditions and safety constraints. This software is deployed as windows standalone application using MATLAB run time compiler. Hence it can run on systems where MATLAB is not installed. In order to test the performance of the software, simple design problems have been solved and the results given by it are compared with those obtained form ETAP – GGS module and after verifying its technical performance it is found to be quite reliable tool in the field of grounding system design.