EVALUATING THE EFFECT OF CONNECTION PLATE THICKNESS AND STIFFNESS ON SEISMIC RESPONSE OF HIGH VOLTAGE CURRENT TRANSFORMERS

Lifelines play a vital role in the life of industrial and developed communities, and any failures in their proper function disrupts the activities and leads to great business interruption losses. Among different groups of lifelines, the power industry is more important due to its widespread use. One of the key elements in the process of transmission and distribution of electric power in the networks are the Substations. The study of recent earthquakes indicates that the vulnerability of equipment inside the substations are really noticeable (Figure 1). One of the main problems in this area is the lack of seismic design provisions for these elements and poor design assumptions.This study has investigated the effect of thickness and flexural rigidity of the plate, connecting the equipment to the top of the supporting structure. The equipment evaluated in this paper is a 230 KV current transformer (Figure 2), which has been selected as an important and key element in the electric power substation, and its seismic behavior has been studied more carefully. For this purpose, the information of the equipment including dimensions, weight and the stiffness of different parts of the equipment have been investigated, in order to prepare an analytical model and begin the seismic analyses by the means of ABAQUS FEA software.

Keywords:

Lifelines , Power network equipment , High voltage substations , Seismic vulnerability , Current transformer