OREANDA-NEWS. In IDGC of Centre, chaired by Deputy General Director for Technical Issues - Chief Engineer Alexander Pilyugin, a meeting of the Scientific and Technical Council on "Compensation of capacitive fault-to-ground current in 6-35 kV grids. Existing types of arc suppression coils, advantages and disadvantages, the problematic issues" was held. The event was attended by representatives of JSC "Russian Grids" and IDGC of Centre's branches, as well as research centres and organizations specializing in the development of equipment for capacitive fault current compensation circuits - BP "HTBE" Ltd. (Ekaterinburg), "MICRO" LLC, LL NPP "Bresler" (Cheboksary), OJSC "RETZ Energy" (Ramenskoye).

Opening the meeting, Alexander Pilyugin noted that the issue of compensation of capacitive fault-to-ground current in 6-35 kV grids is becoming increasingly important. Overhead lines are gradually fading into the past, restrictions on their construction in areas of multi-storey residential development are fixed in the town planning rules and regulations. Laying of electric networks is conducted in the cable design. Their operation is a complicated process that requires careful calculations. In these circumstances, arc suppression coils become one of the key elements of the urban electricity supply, self-tuning to operate in the cable network, depending on the parameters of the required customer. In this regard, IDGC of Centre's experts are actively engaged in the study of advanced developments in this area with a view to their practical application, as well as improvements in the samples used.

Experts of research centres and organizations visiting the council presented their achievements in the capacitive fault current compensation circuits - automatic regulators of arc suppression coils of different types. These devices allow while disconnecting cable sections for repair or at outages automatically to perform recalculation and re-installing the required level of the compensation mode. This helps avoid over-voltage in the grid and massive damage to cables, which often happened until recently.

Their views on the application of the arc suppression coils and suggestions about the organization of interaction with research centres and manufacturers with respect to enhancing their effectiveness was expressed by representatives of IDGC of Centre's branches.

Following the meeting, it was decided to recommend to participants of the scientific and technical council - manufacturers of automatic regulators of arc suppression coils to send to IDGC of Centre information about the possibility of further operation without failure of the previous developments, as well as recommendations for their replacement. It was recommended to the branches of the company to use automatic regulators of the arc suppression coils as a part of the capacitive fault-to-ground current compensation circuits with the function of event logging or individual devices with a logging event function. It is proposed to do it to provide an assessment of performance of compensation systems, as well as to get additional information in the investigation of the causes of technological failures in the capacitive fault-to-ground current compensation circuits in the 6-35 kV grids. Corresponding changes in the adopted by IDGC of Centre typical specifications to supply capacitive fault-to-ground current compensation circuits are supposed to be made until 15 October 2014.