See discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/3275077 Decreasing Grounding Resistance of Substation by Deep-Ground-Well Method Article in IEEE Transactions on Power Delivery · May 2005 DOI: 10.1109/TPWRD.2005.844301 · Source: IEEE Xplore CITATIONS READS 37 9,358 7 authors, including: He Jinliang R. Zeng Tsinghua University Tsinghua University 822 PUBLICATIONS 14,930 CITATIONS 368 PUBLICATIONS 4,859 CITATIONS SEE PROFILE SEE PROFILE Bo Zhang Jun Zou Tsinghua University Tsinghua University 204 PUBLICATIONS 2,932 CITATIONS 107 PUBLICATIONS 1,127 CITATIONS SEE PROFILE Some of the authors of this publication are also working on these related projects: Development of advanced ZnO varistors View project Lightning protection of power systems View project All content following this page was uploaded by He Jinliang on 26 December 2014. The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file. SEE PROFILE 738 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON POWER DELIVERY, VOL. 20, NO. 2, APRIL 2005 Decreasing Grounding Resistance of Substation by Deep-Ground-Well Method Jinliang He, Senior Member, IEEE, Gang Yu, Jingping Yuan, Rong Zeng, Member, IEEE, Bo Zhang, Jun Zou, and Zhicheng Guan Abstract—Grounding system is very important to maintain the safe and reliable operation of power network and ensure the safety of power apparatus and operators. A new technique to decrease grounding resistance of substation is presented in this paper, which makes use of deep ground well to decrease the grounding resistance. The ground well is formed by metal tube with water percolation apertures in the soil with groundwater, which has the ability to gather the groundwater and wet the surrounding soil. The principle of deep ground well to decrease grounding resistance is to decrease the resistivity of the soil region surrounding the grounding well by leading the groundwater moving to the deep ground well under pressure, and consequently decrease the grounding resistance of the deep ground well. This novel method was applied in a substation grounding engineering, and good effect was achieved. Index Terms—Deep ground well, grounding electrode, grounding resistance, grounding system, soil resistivity, substation. I. INTRODUCTION T HE grounding system of substation is a very important and fundamental countermeasure to guarantee the safe and reliable operation of power system, and ensure human being’s safety in the situation of grounding fault in power system [1]. It is a key method to decrease the electromagnetic interferences in substations, too. Safe operation of the power system requires a sound grounding system. When a short-circuit fault current is injected into a grounding system, if its grounding resistance is too high, then the grounding potential rise (GPR) of the grounding system would be very high, this is a threat to operator. Sometimes, the high GPR would destroy control cables, and lead high voltage into control room of substation, this would make control devices misfunctional or reject operating instruction, then would cause huge economical loss and social effect. A lot of these kinds of faults had taken place in China. With the rapid expansion of the capacity of power system, the short-circuit fault current rises enormously. Under such situations, the grounding resistance should be low enough to guarantee the safety of the power system. However, the locations of those substations constructed in urban areas in these years are Manuscript received December 16, 2003; revised June 14, 2004. Paper no. TPWRD-00637-2003. J. He, R. Zeng, B. Zhang, J. Zou, and Z. Guan are with the Department of Electrical Engineering, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China (e-mail: hejl@tsinghua.edu.cn; zengrong@tsinghua.edu.cn; shizbcn@tsinghua.edu.cn; zoujun@tsinghua.edu.cn; guanzc@tsinghua.edu.cn). G. Yu is with China Power Engineering Consulting (Group), Beijing 100011, China. J. Yuan is with Heyuan Electric Power Company, Guangdong 517000, China. Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TPWRD.2005.844301 not in good sites with low soil resistivity, but on the hill or in other regions with high soil resistivity. High grounding resistance would affect the safe operation of power system. Several various methods had been applied to decrease the grounding resistance of the grounding system. Regular methods include enlarging the grounding grid, connecting the main grounding grid with a subsidiary external grounding grid, increasing the burial depth of the grounding grid, utilizing natural grounding object such as steel foundations of structures, adding long vertical grounding electrodes, and changing the soils around the grounding grid with low resistivity materials. These methods are suitable for different geographical situations but that does not mean they should be taken up independently. In fact, in a specific soil environment, two or more methods should be taken up to decrease the grounding resistance effectively. The method to add deep vertical grounding electrodes to the grounding grid is very effective especially in urban substations with small area. This method can utilize the low-resistivity soil layer and eliminate the seasonal influence. In order to decrease the grounding resistance, a special method was proposed to decrease the grounding resistance of grounding grids in high resistivity area, it was called as explosive grounding technique [2]. This method has been verified very effectively in China, and now it has been applied in about 30 grounding projects. The only shortcoming of the explosive grounding technique is the high engineering cost. The paper introduced a novel method to decrease the grounding resistance of substation by adding deep-well grounding electrodes (simply called as deep ground well) to the grounding grid, its principle and application were presented. II. PRINCIPLE OF DEEP GROUND WELL TO DECREASE GROUNDING RESISTANCE A. Influence of Water on Soil Resistivity As discussed in [2], the key to decrease the grounding resistance of substation is changing the soil resistivity around the grounding system, because the grounding resistance of substation is mainly determined by the resistivity of the soil region around the grounding system. The resistivity of soil in nature is decided by the water content, the property and the density of the electrolyte solution, which has the characteristics of ion conduction. Ordinary, the resistivity of the soil with much water is small, and the resistivity of the dry soil is high. The experimental result of clay sample states its resistivity changes very quickly when the water content is smaller than 10 percent. When the water content of the clay 0885-8977/$20.00 © 2005 IEEE HE et al.: DECREASING GROUNDING RESISTANCE OF SUBSTATION BY DEEP-GROUND-WELL METHOD Fig. 1. Principle diagram of water well. Fig. 2. 739 Soil region with saturated water formed by deep ground well. sample is 2.5 percent, its tested resistivity is 1400 m, but when its water content increases to 10 percent, its tested resistivity decreases to 200 m, and when its water content increases to 25 percent, its tested resistivity decreases to 15 m. In southern China, the deep soil is moisture, and contains groundwater, so the resistivity of the deep soil is small. B. Principle of Deep Ground Well to Decrease Grounding Resistance As analyzed above, the water content is a very important factor to decrease the resistivity of soil, the higher the humidity is, the lower the soil resistivity is. Whether can we increase the water content of soil around grounding electrodes to decrease the grounding resistance? As we know, if we dig a well in the earth, then groundwater would move to the well. The principle of a ware well can be explained by Fig. 1, in the soil plane with depth of , the pressure on the sidewall of the well is the atmospheric pressure, the on a groundwater molecule in the soil with depth pressure is the atmospheric pressure plus the soil pressure in the location with depth , it is obvious So, the groundwater molecule would move to the well due to the pressure difference, then groundwater would be accumulated in the well, and a big soil region near the water well is full of water, so the resistivity of soil region full of groundwater is low. If we construct a metal tube electrode as the sidewall of the water well, then the metal tube electrode has low grounding resistance. In order to keep the pressure difference to lead water into the interior of the metal tube, a lot of small holes must be drilled on the tube. During the moving process of the groundwater toward the well, the drag force would be met in the soil. So, the final water level in the well is determined by the balance between the pressure difference and the drag force, this is a dynamic balance process related to the groundwater content. Overall, the principle of deep-ground-well method is to decrease grounding resistance by deep wells to change the moving directions of groundwater in the soil surrounding the grounding electrode, and use the gravity water, capillary water and vaporous water in groundwater to increase the humidity of the soil surrounding the grounding electrode, which will decrease the soil resistivity and consequently decrease the grounding resistance of the grounding electrode. Fig. 3. Soil region with saturated water formed by deep ground well when the deep well touches the soil layer with saturated water. C. Underground Water Ordinarily, there are different kinds of air gaps not only in hard rocks but also in incompact sedimentary soil, they provide the necessary space for the storage and movement of the groundwater in soil. Groundwater is reserved in pores of different rocks, and among gaps of soil particles, which is one link of natural water circulation. The groundwater in pores of different rocks exists in different states, such as hydration water (including held water, pellicular water), gravitative water, capillary water, solid-state water, vaporous water [3]. The groundwater is supplemented by rainwater. According to different states of groundwater, the soil can be treated as dry soil layer, wetting soil layer, and saturated water layer. The existence of groundwater provides the essential condition to decrease the grounding resistance of a grounding electrode. Deep wells are the most effective method to gather the groundwater, and it is a feasible method to utilize deep wells to decrease grounding resistances. D. Influence of Deep Well on the Humidity of the Soil Region Around the Deep Well If the deep ground well does not touch the soil layer with saturated water, or there is not a soil layer with saturated water, the groundwater moves into the interior of the deep well, and a soil region around the well is saturated with water as shown in Fig. 2, the isohume is drawn in the figure, the humidity of the soil near the deep well is high. In the soil region far away from the deep well, the deep water well can not affect the soil humidity in this region. If the deep ground well touches the soil layer with saturated water as illustrated in Fig. 3, a larger soil region with saturated water would be formed by deep ground well. 740 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON POWER DELIVERY, VOL. 20, NO. 2, APRIL 2005 Fig. 4. Sketch diagram of groundwater movement. Fig. 5. Forming low-resistivity channel connecting with the soil layer containing saturated water. III. MECHANISM ANALYSIS OF DEEP GROUND WELL TO DECREASE GROUNDING RESISTANCE The mechanism that the deep ground well has small grounding resistance is summarized in the following. A. Leading the Groundwater Moving to the Deep Ground Well As discussed above, the pressure difference between the sidewall of the wall and the groundwater leads groundwater moving toward the deep well, and gathering in the interior of the deep well. This pressure difference maintains the energy of groundwater motion toward the deep well. As shown in Fig. 3, if there is a soil layer with saturated water, then the water would pass through the small holes in the steel tube and accumulate inside the well (indicated by a in Fig. 4), in the meantime, the accumulated water inside the well would pass through the tube, and move outside the well from its interior to moisture the dry soil region around the deep ground well (indicated by b in Fig. 4), and forms isohume as shown in Figs. 2 and 3, the humidity near the deep ground well is high. At last, the movement of the water forms a dynamic balance related to the groundwater change, and a soil region around the well with high humidity is formed. But in raining season, rainwater would disperse into soil, so this balance would be destroyed, and then a new balance would be formed. If there is an impermeable layer above the groundwater layer in the soil, the water level would exceed it under the pressure, and wet the soil above it and fill the pores of this impermeable layer; or the groundwater directly passes through this impermeable layer from its pores under pressure as for artesian well. So, this deep ground well can be applied in any region with groundwater. B. Forming Low-Resistivity Channel Connecting With Soil Layer With Saturated Water If there is a soil layer with saturated water, the groundwater in this soil layer would move to the deep ground well, and form a saturated region with water, this region contacts with the deep ground well and with the soil layer with saturated water, it forms a low-resistivity channel between them, as shown in Fig. 5. When a fault current is injected into the deep ground well, it would easily disperse into soil through this low-resistivity channel and the soil layer with saturated water. Fig. 6. Influence of vertical pores (a) in dry soil and (b) with groundwater, and horizontal pores (c) in dry soil and (d) with groundwater on current dispersion. C. Forming Low-Resistivity Groundwater Soil contains different mineral substances, and these mineral substances hold different ions. During the movement of the groundwater toward the deep ground well, these ions are dissolved in the groundwater. So, the groundwater has good conductivity, and the moist soil region formed around the deep ground well has low resistivity. D. Filling the Soil Pores With Water If there are pores in dry soil as shown in Fig. 6(a) and (c), which would affect the current dispersing into soil from the grounding electrode, the current must round the pores. But these soil pores in the nearby region around the deep ground well would be filled with groundwater, then the current can directly pass through these pores as shown in Fig. 6(b) and (d), the current dispersing resistance is decreased. On the other hand, the deep ground well sometimes can contact with or puncture through a low-resistivity soil layer, then fault current can directly disperse into this low-resistivity soil layer. IV. FIELD INSTALLATION OF DEEP GROUND WELL As illustrated in Fig. 7(a), during the field installation of the deep ground well, firstly a vertical hole is drilled in the soil. Ordinarily, stainless steel tube or galvanized steel tube is adopted as the grounding electrode, its diameter is about 50 mm, small holes are arranged on the tube for groundwater through the tube. HE et al.: DECREASING GROUNDING RESISTANCE OF SUBSTATION BY DEEP-GROUND-WELL METHOD 741 Fig. 7. Schematic diagram of (a) deep-ground-well and (b) connection of two steel tubes for deep-ground-well. The steel tube is inserted into the drilled hole. A deep ground well is connected by several short steel tubes, two short tubes are connected together by straight fitting, and the connecting region is welded as shown in Fig. 7(b). The gap between the sidewall of the drilled hole and the steel tube is filled with carbon powder with very low resistivity by pressure. The filled carbon powder has good water absorbability, which can keep itself and neighboring soil in humidified state. On the other hand, the carbon powder has good permeability, the groundwater can easily move inside the ground well through it. In order to impede the carbon powder into the steel tube, special filtering film is used to cover these permeable holes on the steel tube. Other materials, such as fine loess or bentonite, can be used to fill the gap between the sidewall of the drilled hole and the steel tube. The top of the steel tube to the ground is 1 m, a small aeration hole is left to keep the pressure in the well is the air pressure. V. APPLICATION OF DEEP GROUND WELL A. Description of the Engineering The proposed deep-ground-well method was applied in the grounding system reconstruction engineering of 110-kV Luohu Substation in Heyuan city, Guandong Province, China, where belongs to southern China, there is abundant groundwater resource. The 110-kV Luohu Substation locates in hill region, the old substation grounding grid was built in September 1984, and the original area of this grounding grid is about 90 90 m , the tested grounding resistance is 1.79 . In 1989, the area of this grounding grid was enlarged to 90 120 m , in the meantime, horizontal grounding electrodes were added to connect the grounding devices of transmission lines together, as illustrated in Fig. 8, the added area is about 3000 m , and the tested grounding resistance was 1.35 . The grounding system of 110-kV Luohu Substation was rebuilt in the end of 1999 by applying this novel deep-ground-well method. The schematic diagram of the grounding system with the deep ground well for 110-kV Luohu Substation is shown in Fig. 8. Ten deep ground wells were added, the lengths of these ten deep ground wells are in the range between 11 m to 15 m. In order to decrease the shielding effect of the grounding grid to vertical deep grounding wells, they are arranged around the Fig. 8. Schematic diagram of the grounding system with the deep ground well for 110-kV Luohu Substation. substation. The total lengths of these 10 deep ground wells are 130 m, and total lengths of those horizontal grounding electrode to connect the deep ground wells with the grounding grid are about 600 m. B. Field Installation Method A drilling machine was used to drill the hole for a deep ground well; the diameter of the drilled holes is 150 mm. Galvanized steel tubes with inner diameter of 40 mm and thickness of 5 mm were used as the grounding electrode of deep ground well. Water permeating holes were drilled uniformly on the steel tube. A deep ground well has several segments of short steel tubes with a length of about 6 m, and short steel tubes were connected together by connecting straight fittings. Fine carbon powders with good conductivity were filled into the gaps between the steel tube and the drilled hole by high pressure to ensure carbon powder having good contact with the steel tube and the surrounding soil. C. Measuring Results and Analysis The reconstructing engineering was fulfilled in December 1999. After one month, the grounding resistances of all ten deep ground wells were measured. Before measurement, the connecting conductors between the grounding grid and the ground well were untied; the measured results of all ten deep ground wells were shown in Table I. The apparent soil resistivity data under different electrode span by Wenner four-electrode configuration were measured [4], too. The measured results in the west and south of substation are different from the results measured in the north-east of substation, The average data were shown in Fig. 9; the analyzed results show the soil geological structure of substation can be handled as 3 horizontal layers, the resistivity and thickness of the first layer is 112.50 m and 2.05 m, the resistivity and thickness of the second layer is 452.50 m and 4.50 m, the resistivity of the third soil layer is 161.50 m. 742 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON POWER DELIVERY, VOL. 20, NO. 2, APRIL 2005 TABLE I GROUNDING RESISTANCE TESTED RESULTS OF TEN DEEP GROUND WELLS Fig. 11.Equivalent low-resistivity region of deep ground well with the shape of (a) cylinder and semi-sphere in the bottom and (b) cylinder. TABLE II ANALYZED WIDTH OF EQUIVALENT LOW-RESISTIVITY REGION Fig. 9. Relationship between the apparent soil resistivity and the test electrode span by Wenner four-electrode configuration. Fig. 10. Geological structure of the substation area. According to the soil drilled out, the first 2 m soil is black sandy one, then gravel soil layer and loess layer with thickness of 3 to 5 m appear alternately as shown in Fig. 10. Below the second gravel soil layer, the soil is moist. The gravel soil layer is full of apertures, which has very good capability to keep water. The first loess layer is close-grained, which prevents the groundwater volatilized. Before adding these ten deep ground wells, the grounding resistance of the grounding grid is 1.35 , and the area is about 11 000 m , so the estimated equivalent resistivity is 283.2 m. After these ten deep ground wells were added to the grounding grid, the tested grounding resistance is 0.5 by the fall-of-potential method [4], this value keeps unchanged in every year routine test. The total area of the grounding system is about 14 600 m , the respective equivalent resistivity decreases to about 120.8 m. Comparing with the 1.35 , the grounding resistance is decreased about 63%. These deep-ground-wells are very powerful to decrease grounding resistance. VI. ESTIMATION OF EQUIVALENT LOW-RESISTIVITY REGION FORMED BY DEEP GROUND WELL The deep ground well can be treated as a vertical grounding electrode with low-resistivity region around it, which can be modeled by a cylinder region, the bottom region is modeled as a semi-sphere region as shown in Fig. 11(a). But the grounding resistance of this equivalent model is difficultly calculated. So, a cylinder region is used to simulate the low-resistivity region around the deep ground well as shown in Fig. 11(b), is the diameter of the steel tube, and is the equivalent width of the low-resistivity region. The grounding resistance of a deep ground well can be calculated by numerical analysis software package according to the horizontal multi-layer soil model analyzed above. The CDEGS software package was used in our analysis [5]. The resistivity in the equivalent cylinder soil region is supposed as 0, the analyzed results of deep-ground-well’s (DGW’s) equivalent width are illustrated in Table II. The analyzed equivalent width is in the range of 0.26 m to 2.04 m, and the average width is 1.44 m. So the diameter of the equivalent region with low-resistivity is 0.57 to 4.13 m, and the average diameter is 2.93 m. The diameter of the ground well is 50 mm, then the equivalent diameters are 11.4 to 40.8 times of that of the ground well. A. Equivalent Soil Resistivity of Deep Ground Well As discussed above, the deep ground well can be analyzed as a vertical grounding electrode, if the soil is regarded as uniform, then the equivalent resistivity of each deep ground well can be calculated by [4] HE et al.: DECREASING GROUNDING RESISTANCE OF SUBSTATION BY DEEP-GROUND-WELL METHOD TABLE III EQUIVALENT SOIL RESISTIVITIES OF TEN GROUND WELLS 743 grid should be decreased to 0.5 by these ten popular vertical grounding electrodes, then all their length should be 40 m, this shows the deep-ground-well is powerful in decreasing grounding resistance of substation. For the grounding system with deep-ground-wells in Fig. 8, the numerically analyzed grounding resistance of the grounding system is 0.528 , which is very close to 0.5 measured by field test. C. Application Range of Deep Ground Well TABLE IV ANALYZED GROUNDING RESISTANCE OF POPULAR VERTICAL GROUNDING ELECTRODES where, is the grounding resistance of a deep ground well, and are the radius and length of the deep ground well. If the analyzed equivalent resistivity from a ground well is smaller than that from another one, then this ground well has better effect to decrease grounding resistance. The equivalent soil resistivities of ten ground wells are analyzed and shown in Table III, which are much smaller than the soil resistiviy analyzed from field test results. The reason is that the effect of soil region with saturated water had been considered into it. There is not water gathered in no. 5 deep ground well, so its equivalent resistivity is higher than those of other deep ground wells, but it is still much smaller than the equivalent resistivity obtained from the grounding resistance of grounding system. The reason is that the deep ground well leads the groundwater moving to it, although there is not water gathered in the well, but the humidity of the soil around it increases. B. Comparison With Popular Vertical Grounding Electrode According to the multi-layer soil model analyzed above, if these deep ground wells were popular vertical grounding electrodes, their respective grounding resistance would be analyzed by numerical analysis software package. Where, the popular vertical grounding electrode means a grounding rod with the same length and diameter of the ground well. The analyzed results are illustrated in Table IV, the grounding resistances of popular vertical grounding electrodes with the same diameter of the deep ground well are 1.57 to 3.27 times of those of deep ground wells. So, the deep ground well can effectively decrease grounding resistance. The measured grounding resistance of the rebuilt substation after ten deep grounding wells were added to the grounding grid is 0.5 . If the grounding resistance of this substation grounding The principle of the deep ground well is to lead groundwater moving to it, so the deep ground well method can only be used in the region with groundwater. If there is not groundwater, it can only be regarded as a popular vertical grounding electrode. VII. CONCLUSION Grounding system is very important to maintain the safe and reliable operation of power network and ensure the safety of power apparatus and operators. On the basis of summarizing the advanced grounding technologies, a new grounding technique is proposed, which makes use of deep well to decrease the grounding resistance of substation. There are different kinds of air gaps not only in hard rocks but also in incompact sedimentary soil, which provide the necessary space for the storage and movement of the groundwater in soil, and the essential condition for utilizing the groundwater to decrease grounding resistance of a grounding electrode. Deep well is the most effective method to gather the groundwater. It is a feasible method to utilize deep well to decrease grounding resistance of a grounding electrode. Utilizing deep wells to decrease grounding resistance is mainly to use deep wells to change the moving directions of groundwater in the soil surrounding the grounding electrodes, and use the gravity water, capillary water and vaporous water in groundwater to increase the humidity of the soil surrounding the grounding electrode, which will decrease the soil resistivity near the grounding substation and consequently decrease the grounding resistance of the grounding electrode. The deep ground wells use steel tubes as the electrodes. These steel tubes must meet the demand of related standards of grounding devices in power system, such as mechanical robustness and the anti-corrosive capability. A lot of water percolation apertures are drilled on the steel tube, these steel tubes have the ability to gather the groundwater and wet the surrounding soil. So they are not only grounding conductors but also solid sidewalls of deep wells. The field experiment of deep-well grounding electrode is performed with the reconstruction of the ground grids for a 110-kV substation. The experimental results indicate that the design of grounding electrodes can effectively make use of the groundwater to decrease the grounding resistance. The diameter of the equivalent region with low-resistivity obtained from numerical analysis with multi-layer soil model is 0.57 m to 4.13 m, and the average diameter is 2.93 m. The diameter of the ground well is 50 mm, then the equivalent diameters are 11.4 to 40.8 times of that of the ground well. We can conclude that the deep ground wells are suitable for the soil with some content of groundwater, good permeability and big void fraction, especially with multi-layer structure. 744 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON POWER DELIVERY, VOL. 20, NO. 2, APRIL 2005 REFERENCES [1] IEEE Guide for Safety in AC Substation Grounding, IEEE Standard 80-2000, 2000. [2] Q. B. Meng, J. L. He, F. P. Dawalibi, and J. Ma, “A new methods to decrease ground resistances of substation grounding systems in high resistivity regions,” IEEE Trans. Power Delivery, vol. 14, no. 2, pp. 911–916, 1999. [3] G. H. Li, Z. C. Liu, and X. Zhang, Water Resource Application and Management Engineering. Beijing, China: Tsinghua Univ. Press, 1998. [4] IEEE Guide for Measuring Earth Resistivity, Ground Impedance, and Earth Surface Potentials of a Ground System, ANSI/IEEE Std. 81-1983, 1983. [5] F. P. Dawalibi and F. Donoso, “Integrated analysis software for grounding, EMF, and EMI,” IEEE Comput. Applicat. Power, vol. 6, no. 2, pp. 19–24, 1993. Jinliang He (M’02–SM’02) was born in Changsha, China, in 1966. He received the B.Sc. degree from Wuhan University of Hydraulic and Electrical Engineering, Wuhan, China, the M.Sc. degree from Chongqing University, Chongqing, China, and the Ph.D. degree from Tsinghua University, Beijing, China, all in electrical engineering, in 1988, 1991, and 1994, respectively. He became a Lecturer in 1994, and an Associate Professor in 1996, in the Department of Electrical Engineering, Tsinghua University. From 1994 to 1997, he was the Head of High Voltage Laboratory in Tsinghua University. From April 1997 to April 1998, he was a Visiting Scientist in Korea Electrotechnology Research Institute in Changwon, Korea, involved in research on metal oxide varistors and high voltage polymeric metal oxide surge arresters. In 2001, he was promoted to Professor at Tsinghua University. Now he is the Vice Chief of High Voltage Research Institute in Tsinghua University. His research interests include overvoltages and EMC in power systems and electronic systems, grounding technology, power apparatus, dielectric material, and power distribution automation. He is the authors of four books and many technical papers. Dr. He is a senior member of China Electrotechnology Society, and a member of the International Compumag Society. He is the China representative of IEC TC 81, vice chief of China Lightning Protection Standardization Technology Committee, and members of Electromagnetic Interference Protection Committee and Transmission Line Committee of China Power Electric Society, member of China Surge Arrester Standardization Technology Committee, and member of Overvoltage and Insulation Coordination Standardization Technology Committee and Surge Arrester Standardization Technology Committee in Electric Power Industry. He is the chief editor of the Journal of Lightning Protection and Standardization (in Chinese). Gang Yu was born in Shandong, China, in 1961. He received the B.Sc. degree from Shandong University of Technology, in 1972, and the M.Eng. degree from China Electric Power Research Institute in 1998. He is doing part-time research for a Ph.D. degree in Tsinghua University. Now he is Deputy President of China Power Engineering Consulting (Group). His research field includes power system design, electromagnetic environment of power system, and grounding technology. Jingping Yuan was born in Heyuan, Guangdong, China, in 1966. He received the B.Sc. from the Department of Electrical Engineering, South China University of Technology, Guangzhou, July 1988, and the M.Eng. from the Department of Electrical Engineering, Tsinghua University, Beijing, in 2002. He is now a Senior Engineer in Heyuan Electric Power Company, Guangdong, China. His research interests include high voltage technology, grounding technology, power electronics and distribution system automation, and power system management. View publication stats Rong Zeng (M’02) was born in Shaanxi, China, in 1971. He received the B.Sc., M.Eng., and Ph.D. degrees from the Department of Electrical Engineering, Tsinghua University, Beijing, respectively, in 1995, 1997, and 1999. He became a Lecturer in the Department of Electrical Engineering, Tsinghua University, in August 1999, and an Associate Professor in the same department, Tsinghua University in December 2002. His research interests include high voltage technology, grounding technology, power electronics, and distribution system automation. Bo Zhang was born in Datong, China, in 1976. He received the B.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in theoretical electrical engineering from the North China Electric Power University, Baoding, in 1998 and 2003, respectively. Currently, he is a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Department of Electrical Engineering at Tsinghua University. His research interests include computational electromagnetics, grounding technology, and EMC in power systems. Jun Zou was born in Wuhan, China, in 1971. He received the B.S. and M.S. degrees from Zhengzhou University, Zhengzhou, Henan Province, in July 1994 and July 1997, respectively, and the Ph.D. degree from Tsinghua University in Beijing, in July 2001, all in electrical engineering. He became a lecturer in the Department of Electrical Engineering, Tsinghua University in Beijing in August 2001. His research fields include computational electromagnetics and EMC. Zhicheng Guan was born in Jilin, China, in 1944. He received the B.Sc., M.Eng., and Ph.D. degrees from the Department of Electrical Engineering, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China, respectively in 1970, 1981, and 1984. From 1984 to 1987, he was a Lecturer and the Director of High Voltage Laboratory in the Department of Electrical Engineering, Tsinghua University. From 1988 to 1989, he was a visiting Scholar in University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology (UMIST), U.K. From 1989 to 1991, he was an Associate Professor and the Director of High Voltage Laboratory. In 1991, he was promoted to a Professor of Tsinghua University. From 1992 to 1993, he was the Head of the Department of Electrical Engineering, Tsinghua University. From 1993 to 1994, he was the Assistant President of Tsinghua University, and from 1994 to 1999, he was the vice President of Tsinghua University, and since March 1999, he has been the Vice President of Tsinghua University Council. His major research fields include high voltage insulation and electrical discharge, composite insulators and flashover of contaminated insulators, electrical environment technology, high voltage measurement, and application of plasma and high voltage technology in biological and environment engineering. He owns many titles in academic societies. He is the author of more than 150 academic papers.