Dr Lukas Schwalt, Post-Doc Researcher at Graz University of Technology, and Dr Diptargha Chakravorty, vice chair of CIGRE UK NGN and Senior Consultant with TNEI Services, shared their research outcomes on Lightning Phenomena and Power System Transients through an online webinar on 12th November 2020. There were over 90 people attending the event.
The webinar is organised by the CIGRE UK & Austria NGN and hosted by the University of Birmingham Zoom platform.
The webinar was chaired by Ying Xue, Secretary & Treasurer of CIGRE UK NGN, Lecturer in Electrical Power Networks in the University of Birmingham. He introduced CIGRE UK NGN and key past events including the Young Member Showcase competition.
Manuel Galler, chair of CIGRE Austria NGN, introduced the establishment of Austria NGN in 2019 and the election of Austrian NGN Committee in March 2020. He further introduced key activities that Austria NGN was involved or organized in the past year and its future activities in 2021.
As the first speaker, Dr Lukas Schwalt first explained the general lightning characteristics with an emphasis on the Cloud-to-Ground (CG) Flash. He then introduced in detail his work of on-site measurements of CG flashes, where he showed the equipment he used and video and field records at different locations in the Austrian Alpine region. He further presented the correlation and analysis of Video and Filed Recording System (VFRS) and Lightning Location System (LLS) data.
Dr Diptargha Chakravorty started off his presentation by introducing the innovation competition project ‘Distributed ReStart’ and the motivation for using Distributed Energy Resources (DERs) to support system restoration. He the introduced the details of the test network that he used and arrangements of the case studies to assess the impact of different factors (e.g., energisation voltage and point on wave switching) on the unbalance and over-voltage in the system. He concluded his presentation by summarizing the key findings from the case studies.