An on-line lightning monitoring system for transmission lines

In order to identify the exact location of lightning strikes on a transmission line, an on-line monitoring system has been developed by the authors comprising front-end lightning detection systems installed on transmission towers, and a remote server running in the control room. The on-line monitoring system can not only obtain the current waveform, the tower number, the exact line and stroke polarity, but also determine the stroke pattern as a result of either lightning shielding failure or back flashover. In order to overcome the difficulties associated with multiple lightning strikes which often occur in quick succession along lightning channel after the main discharge, a novel method is developed to acquire multiple lightning strikes according to their characteristics. The system is designed to communicate with the remote server automatically by a GPRS wireless module. Finally, the examination results of the effectiveness of the on-line monitoring system, carried out by experiments in a lab.