I blogged previously about entegra, a company based in Germany that provides substation design solutions.  Entegra’s substation design application is called primtech
which has been optimized for  designing large substations.  It
includes an extensible library of intelligent 3D objects such as power
switches, transformers, isolators, insulators, chains, high-voltage
cables, high-voltage pipes, foundations, steel structures, and
terminals.  Last year I blogged about Primtech’s support for lightning protection design.

The most recent major addition for substation designers is clearance calculation which is included in primtech 12.  Air Insulated substations require minimum distances between the different phases of live facilities as well as between live and grounded equipment. In addition minimum clearances are required between live facilities and surrounding fences and vehicle routes through the substation.  Primtech is now able to automatically compute these types of clearances according to the IEC 60071-2 standard.  

To do this requires a 3D CAD model of the substation and information for each piece of equipment indicating whether it is live, grounded, an insulator,  a fence or a vehicle route.  Based on this information primtech’s Phase Checker automatically assigns each facility to the appropriate phase.  The phase checking also allows you to verify that all of the live conductors and other equipment are properly connected. 

Based on the 3D model and the phase assignments, all of the required minimum clearances for the whole substation can then be automatically computed.   Primtech is flexible in that it allows you to specify particular areas where you are interested in looking at clearances.  Primtech will then visually highlight the areas which do not satisfy the minimum clearances for phase to phase,  phase to ground,  phases to roads, phases to fences, phases to ground level, and insulators to ground level.  In addition to computing clearances, Primtech can also automatically perform collision detection to detect mechanical interferences between different pieces of equipment.