Lightning protection for wind power generation systems
Lightning is a strong atmospheric long-distance discharge phenomenon, which can directly or indirectly cause disasters to many facilities on the ground. As towering and protruding platforms on the ground, wind turbines are exposed to the atmospheric environment for a long time, and most of them are located in wilderness areas, so they are vulnerable to lightning strikes. When a lightning strike occurs, the huge energy released by the lightning discharge will cause serious damage to the blades, transmission, power generation and transformation equipment and control system of the wind turbine, leading to the outage of the unit and causing greater economic losses.
Wind energy is a renewable and clean energy, and wind power generation is the power resource with the most large-scale development conditions today. In order to obtain more wind energy, the single-unit capacity of wind turbines continues to increase, and the height of wind turbines increases with the increase of hub height and impeller diameter, and the risk of lightning strikes also increases. Therefore, lightning strikes have become the most harmful natural disasters in nature to the safe operation of wind turbines.
For wind power generation systems, according to the lightning protection protection, it can be divided into several levels of protection areas from outside to inside. The outermost is LPZ0 area, which is the area directly struck by lightning, with the highest risk. The further inward, the lower the degree of danger. The LPZ0 zone is mainly formed by external lightning protection devices, reinforced concrete and metal pipes and other structures to form a barrier layer. The overvoltage mainly enters along the line, and the equipment is protected by the surge protector.
TRS series surge protectors for wind power systems all use an overvoltage protection element with excellent nonlinear characteristics. Under normal circumstances, the surge protector is in a state of extremely high resistance, and the leakage current is almost zero, so as to ensure the normal power supply of the wind power system. When a surge overvoltage occurs in the system, the TRS series wind power system surge protector will be turned on immediately in nanoseconds, limiting the amplitude of the overvoltage within the safe working range of the equipment, and at the same time transmitting the surge energy into the Then, the surge protector quickly changes to a high-resistance state, so as not to affect the normal operation of the wind power system.