Electrical grounding connects devices to the earth, providing a safe path for excess electricity, reducing the risk of shock and fires. It ensures safety during insulation failures, accidental contacts, and overvoltage situations, using methods like grounding wires and ground fault circuit interrupters. There are various grounding systems, including solid, resistance, and reactance grounding, each with its advantages and disadvantages in terms of safety and cost.
Electrical grounding connects devices to the earth, providing a safe path for excess electricity, reducing the risk of shock and fires. It ensures safety during insulation failures, accidental contacts, and overvoltage situations, using methods like grounding wires and ground fault circuit interrupters. There are various grounding systems, including solid, resistance, and reactance grounding, each with its advantages and disadvantages in terms of safety and cost.
Electrical grounding connects devices to the earth, providing a safe path for excess electricity, reducing the risk of shock and fires. It ensures safety during insulation failures, accidental contacts, and overvoltage situations, using methods like grounding wires and ground fault circuit interrupters. There are various grounding systems, including solid, resistance, and reactance grounding, each with its advantages and disadvantages in terms of safety and cost.
Electrical grounding connects devices to the earth, providing a safe path for excess electricity, reducing the risk of shock and fires. It ensures safety during insulation failures, accidental contacts, and overvoltage situations, using methods like grounding wires and ground fault circuit interrupters. There are various grounding systems, including solid, resistance, and reactance grounding, each with its advantages and disadvantages in terms of safety and cost.
Electrical grounding is the process of connecting an
electrical device or conductor to the earth, which provides a safe path for excess electricity to escape. This reduces the risk of electrical shock, electrocution, and fires.
The principle reason of facilitating the grounding is to
enable immediate diversion of heavy fault current in the event of a circuit fault, there by protection is provided against electric shock hazards to people and animals. Why Grounding is Needed? Safety to Personnel and Equipment Grounding provides the safety to personnel and equipment by ensuring operation of protective control gear and isolation of the faulty circuit under the following cases.
Insulation Failure Accidental Contact between Wires of High and Low Voltage
Over Voltage Protection
During lighting strokes, unintentional contact with higher voltage lines, or line surges in the circuit can cause a serious high voltage in the power distribution system. So the grounding provides the low resistance path in order to send an extra charge safely to the ground. HERE ARE SOME WAYS GROUNDING WORKS:
•Grounding wire: Most electrical systems have a grounding wire
that connects to the ground or the chassis of an automobile or airplane. The ground's negative electrical charge neutralizes positively charged electricity.
•Ground fault circuit interrupter: This device senses leakage
current or earth leakage and shuts down the circuit. •System grounding: Helps detect and clear ground faults. •Equipment grounding: Provides a return path for ground-fault current. Ground fault circuit interrupter: This device senses leakage current or earth leakage and shuts down the circuit. There are three types of grounding systems: Ungrounded systems, Resistance grounded systems, and Solidly grounded systems. System or Neutral Grounding
The major consideration in neutral grounding system is to provide
safety to the human beings and to maintain safe working of electrical appliances, under the assured operation of protective relay system. System or Neutral Grounding This offers improved service reliability, greater safety, reduction of transient voltages, and improved fault protection. The commonly used methods of system grounding include;
Solid Grounding
In this, the neutral conductor is directly connected to
ground without any impedance between the neutral and earth as shown in figure. It is simple and inexpensive method that it requires no extra equipment. It minimizes the over voltage in the faulty phase during a phase to ground fault which results in reduction of stress on insulation on the faulty conductor. This method is most commonly used in industrial and commercial power system operations. The disadvantage of the solid grounding is that a severe flashes or arcing hazards are caused during high line to ground faults. These arcs may cause the burning of protective devices.
This system becomes unstable as it has to bear a huge current
during phase to earth faults. So this grounding is usually employed where the circuit impedance is sufficiently high in order to keep the earth fault current within safe limits. Resistance Grounding In this, a resistor is used between the star point (neutral point) and earth. Resistance limits the magnitude of an earth fault current in safe limits. This resistance value should neither be very high or very low. If the resistance is very high, the system will become ungrounded neutral system.
On the other hand, if this value is very low, the
system will become a solid grounding system. Therefore, the value of the resistance should be in such a way that the fault current is limited to safer value while permitting the operation of earth fault protection system. The disadvantage of this system is that there is an enormous energy loss in the neutral earth resistance due to the dissipation of the fault energy and also it is costlier than the solid ground system. Reactance Grounding In this, a reactor is used in place of resistor. Similar to the resistance, reactance must be chosen to suit the requirements of protection, or to control the inductive interference. The reactive part of the fault current is compensated by this reactor.
These are used when the amount of current
reduction is small. This is because reactor of low resistance to handle large quantities of current can be built at low cost as compared with the resistor for the same current limitation. Arc Suspension Coil Grounding or Resonant Grounding
In this, an adjustable reactor is placed in
between the star point or neutral point and earth in order to balance the fault current with capacitive current. We know that capacitance exists between each line and earth. So, the capacitive currents through these capacitors is responsible for producing the arcing grounds (repeated arcing across the fault due to capacitances). Equipment Grounding
As discussed earlier that connecting
metallic enclosures or non-current carrying metal parts of the electrical equipment to earth is called as equipment grounding.
Consider that an electrical equipment of The current from the mains has two paths; one path is through the apparatus and other through insulation resistance R is connected across the supply resistance of the apparatus next resistance Rb of the body and finally through earth resistance Re to the mains and assume that it is not grounded or neutral of the supply. earthed as shown in figure below. Let Rb be the resistance of the body of a person who touches the apparatus while maintaining contact with the earth as shown in figure
