Estimation of Required Slack for Conductors Connecting Substation Equipment Subjected to Earthquake

Typical electrical substation equipment items are usually connected to each other through flexible conductors. If the connections are not flexible enough, they may cause intense dynamic interaction between the equipment during an earthquake. This research is to analytically study the performance of different flexible conductor configurations used mostly in the interconnected substation items, as well as the effects of parameters. A set of three synthetic ground motions, which are matched with IEEE Standard 693 design spectrum, was created as the design input motions and two sample cases of interconnected equipment were considered to put the proposed method into practice. In order to evaluate the reliability of the proposed approach, two sets of real ground motions recorded on stiff soil were used to assess designed conductor configurations. The capability of the OpenSees model in simulating static and dynamic behavior of conductors is studied as well.