In modern society, we cannot think to live without electrical power. In early days electricity was transmitted by using direct current. After Nicolas Tesla invented alternating current 1886, this electrical transmission gets much popular. Today we can send power through the continent by using this alternating current.
Once the length of the transmission line becomes longer, the conductor resistance also gets the increase, so the energy loss is also getting increased. This problem of the AC transmission is much solved by using transformers to step up voltages.
But there is another problem that occurs due to the impedance of the transmission line another external property call reactance also happen in this transmission lines and this lead loss in the front too. This happens mainly due to the property of inductance and the capacitance of the transmission line.
Inductors have commonly resisted the changing in current, and temporarily storing energy in the magnetic field. The capacitor is also opposed to the voltage differences and temporarily storing energy in the electric field.
Altogether this can cause the phase shift between the voltage and the current in the line and also it results from an increase in the resistive losses. Usually, this energy loss can get reduced by adding capacitor banks at power substations to improve the power factor.
Transmission losses can happen due to several reasons such as radiation losses, conductor losses, heating losses (dielectric), coronal losses and coupling losses.
Conductor losses of the transmission line.
Conductor losses mainly occur due to the current flow in the conductor. Since the transmission line contains more considerable resistance, this type of injuries is unavoidable.
This type of losses is also known as heating losses because it also generates heat energy.
Different Types of Transmission Line Losses
There are several alternative methods are applied to reduce this type of losses such as by using a larger diameter of conductor and several other ways.
There are different kind of losses which are applicable for the transmission line losses, and those are
- Coupling losses
- Corona losses
- Skin Effect
- Radiation Losses
- Dielectric Heating Losses
So to prevent kind of injuries different level of methods is applied in the electrical industry.
The empirical way of Reducing the losses of Transmission Lines
Transmission losses can reduce theoretically by shortening the length of the transmission line. However, this is not a partial way of doing it because in some cases the length of the transmission line should be a certain length.
Another way to reduce the transmission losses are increasing the diameter of the wire, but when you are growing the wire length, you should also need to understand that cost of the conductor also gets high due to that.
