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The ETAP SoCal User Group met February 12, 2019 in Irvine to learn and discuss Ground Grid Design and Optimization.
Ground grid systems are necessary to direct faults to earth, limit voltage rise and eliminate step and touch potentials to ultimately limit electric shock related incidents. When designing a grounding grid, engineers are faced with these complex technical challenges as well as optimizing the size of conductors and number of rods to increase material cost savings.
ETAP Ground Grid provides flexible design methodologies for quick auto-designed layouts or very detailed schemes, while maintaining the goal of reducing design time and project material costs. Advanced 3-D technology integrated with the one-line diagram enables engineers to visualize their ground grid and automatically use short circuit results, removing the need to manually transfer the fault currents from a separate database.
Ground Grid in ETAP 19 has been enhanced to include a soil resistivity calculator. Attendees learned how to convert field measurements into appropriate soil models using industry standard ground resistivity calculations, and perform safety assessment using IEEE 80 and Finite Element Method in an integrated application.
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