Deployment of standalone Software for Optimal Design of

Substation Grounding System

P. K. Jani1, Kaustubh A. Vyas2, J.G. Jamnani3
1 P. G. Scholar, Kalol Institute of Technology & Research Center, Kalol, Gujarat, India
2 Dept. of Elect. Engg, Venus International College of Technology, Gandhinagar, Gujarat, India
3 Dept. of Elect. Engg, School of Technology, PDPU Gandhinagar, Gujarat, India

Abstract Substation grounding system being very much important part

of entire power system, it deserves considerable care and attention,
particularly at design stage, primarily to ensure electrical safety of persons
working within or near substations. This work is mainly concerned with
development of standalone software which eases design of grounding
system as per IEEE standard. Here windows standalone application has
been developed using MATLAB Graphical User Interface Development
Environment as a programming platform and mathematical computing tool
as well. Application developed here is found to be quite useful and
effective software for electrical engineers working in power systems. With
further development, it is proposed to become effective tool in the
professional field of grounding system design. This work explores
applicability of MATLAB for software / application development and can be
quite appreciable for engineers not expert in software languages but can
use MATLAB for their day to day use. Here sample problem is solved to
demonstrate capabilities of the software developed. Its performance is
validated by comparing the results given by it with those obtained by
commercially used software ETAP. Comparison of the results proves
technical soundness of the software.
Keywords: Grounding, MATLAB, Standalone Software, Safety, Substation

1. INTRODUCTION
On its way from generating station to the end consumers, through extensive transmission and
distribution network, electrical power passes through number of different kind of substations. Thus
substations can be called as heart of the entire power system because integrity of operation of
complete power system depends to a considerable extent on reliable and successful operation of
substations. It is therefore essential to exercise at most care while designing and building a
substation. Grounding system plays crucial role in the performance of a substation as it provides
place for connecting system neutral points, equipment body and support structures to the earth. It
also ensures safety of working personnel within the substation and enables earth fault detection
and protection. It provides path for discharging the earth currents from neutrals of equipments,
faults, surge arrestors, overhead shielding wires etc. It keeps step and touch potential within
tolerable limits. Hence properly designed and installed grounding system ensures reliable
performance of electrical substation, safety of persons working within or near substation and limits
the ground potential rise GPR within acceptable levels. Absence of safe and effective grounding
system can result in mal-operation or non-operation of control and protective devices thereby
disturbing operation of complete power system. Hence great care should be taken while designing
grounding system of any substation, primarily to ensure electrical safety of persons working within
or near substations. Substation grounding system being an essential part of the overall electrical
system, its design is also of very much importance [1, 2].

Design of grounding system is an area in which there has been extensive study and analysis for
last five decades. Several methods for grounding system analysis and design have been
proposed. Numbers of computer programs have been developed to calculate safety parameters of
an earthing installation in order to obtain a reliable model of ground grid and predict the hazardous
scenarios which could occur under certain situations. Most of these methods are based on
professional experience, on semi empirical works, on experimental data obtained from scale
models and laboratory tests or intuitive idea [3 - 8].
This paper mainly describes development and use of software Grounding System Analyzer
(GSA). It is designed using MATLAB as a mathematical computing tool as well as programming
platform. Basically MATLAB is a numerical computing environment and fourth-generation
programming language developed by Math Works. MATLAB allows matrix manipulations, plotting
of functions and data, implementation of algorithms, creation of user interfaces, and interfacing
with programs written in other languages, including C, C++, Java, and FORTRAN. Here GUI
development facility of MATLAB (GUIDE) is exploited to design user friendly and also technically
well proven software. In order to validate the technical performance of software developed here, a
sample design problem has been solved by GSA in uniform soil for safety performance analysis of
substation grounding system. Results obtained by it are compared with those given by Ground
Grid Systems (GGS) module of ETAP power station. Comparison of results obtained by both the
software clearly shows that GSA gives fairly correct results for grounding system design and it is
found to be trustworthy tool for design of grounding systems of HV / EHV substations as far as
performance of grounding system is evaluated at power frequency.
2. INTRODUCTION TO MATLAB GUI DEVELOPMENT ENVIRONMENT
2.1. Why MATLAB for GUI development?

In addition to simple coding, MATLAB also allows creation of graphical user interfaces [8, 9].
Though there are many advanced programming tools available for GUI based programming
systems that allow creation of GUI applications, there are numerous persuasive arguments that
support MATLAB as GUI development tool. Following are some significant reasons that describe
encouraging applicability of MATLAB for GUI development [10].
High level script based development
Seamless integration with existing MATLAB computational power
Operating system independent GUI applications
User inter activity and real time measurements
Code developed by MATLAB work on various platforms such as MS Windows, UNIX, Linux
and Mac OS-X.
Also GUI developed by MATLAB works satisfactorily on various operating systems with little or
no modifications.
Previously in order to develop software, toolbox or standalone applications, one had to rely on
C++, Visual basic, or Java. For a computer science or information technology student it is easy to
program in these environments but for other science and engineering students this pose a problem
since they are not familiar with these programs and may not have excellent programming
expertise. Nevertheless MATLAB also has very nice inherent GUI development environment called
as GUIDE that allows creation of GUI so that the code becomes more user friendly. It is similar to
VB for creating GUI. It also includes low-level commands that allow user to fully customize the
appearance of graphics as well as to build complete Graphical User Interfaces on MATLAB
applications. Also with the help of deployment tool it can deploy windows standalone application
so that the application can be used even in absence of MATLAB.
2.2. Salient features of MATLAB GUIDE for GUI development?

Math Works has provided MATLAB programmers with a set of structured event driven components
in the form of user interface controls (uicontrols) and menus (uimenus) that can easily be
assembled and used to create GUIs. The fundamental power of GUI is that they provide a means
through which individuals can communicate with the computer without programming commands.
The components have become quite standardized and developed into a user friendly and intuitive
set of tools. These tools can be used to increase the productivity of a user or to provide a window
to the sophistication and power of a MATLAB application for people with little or no MATLAB
programming experience [11].
MATLAB contains functions for low level GUI development that allow creation of GUI
programmatically, also high level GUI development using graphical layout tool with inbuilt

properties defined is available which is more convenient tool for GUI application development.
When one already uses MATLAB for solving the problems in the field of engineering and / or
science and has number of functions and scripts for solving specific problems on hand, MATLAB
GUI development Environment (GUIDE) offers quite efficient and easy opportunity for building GUI
by directly using the already available code within the GUI and thus saving large programming
effort. This integration of MATLAB script and function files with the figure files can prove priceless
and programmer friendly also in addition to being user friendly. No doubt script files and function
files in MATLAB are quite efficient in solving majority of problems in various fields of engineering,
technology and science; often situations arise where user interactivity is essential for
understanding or solving particular problem.
3. DEVELOPMENT OF GROUNDING SYSTEM ANALYZER SOFTWARE
3.1 General

As mentioned earlier, MATLAB GUIDE allows creation of GUI so that the code becomes more
user-friendly. Here software named Grounding System Analyzer (GSA) has been developed
using MATLAB GUIDE. GSA is preliminary developed in order to assist the design engineer in the
analyzing designs of substation grounding system. This is for the first time that such stand alone
application for grounding system design is developed using MATLAB GUIDE. This explores
applicability of MATLAB for GUI development that helps programmers familiar with MATLAB
coding in terms of application deployment. With the help of MATLAB GUIDE standalone
applications can be developed for professional use or for educational or training program. GSA is
found to be quite useful for electrical engineering students for gaining basic knowledge about
grounding system design. Additionally this is highly praiseworthy for substation designer in order to
get very clear first idea about preliminary design of grounding system design based on which
detailed designs as per site specific requirements can be developed. With continuous
development going on, it is proposed to be standalone professional software for design of
substation grounding system. Here only the algorithm developed for implementation of theoretical
concepts of grounding system design in the software and application of optimization are
discussed. Readers interested in grounding system design are referred to [2, 12] for further details
and methodology related to substation grounding system design procedure.
3.2 Algorithm for working of GSA

In addition to analysing grounding system as per IEEE guide lines, GSA can analyze system by
using FE analysis method. It also allows soil model extraction from earth resistivity test data. GSA
is designed to work for uniform soil as well as for two layered soils for analysing performance of
grounding system as per IEEE guidelines or by rigorous analysis method.

Fig. 1: Main page of GSA software

Fig. 1 shows main page of GSA that allows access to all other input, analysis and output modules.
It takes main details related to substation grounding system design such as shape of ground grid
and voltage rating of the substation. This page allows access to all other input - output modules.
By accessing various other input pages like grid layout, soil model and system data, further details

about grounding system design can be entered. Report for the designed grounding system can
also be generated from here which will be Microsoft word document. Equations given in [12, 13]
and other derived from relevant literature are converted into MATLAB code and implemented as
per algorithm shown in fig. 2 which describes flow chart for working of GSA.
3.3 Role of GUIDE in development of standalone software GSA
GUI development environment in MATLAB allows creation of GUIs simply in drag and drop
manner. Properties of various GUI components can be managed by property inspector tool. Also
m file containing code for displaying the components on GUI and callbacks that handle the
behaviour of GUI can be generated from the GUIDE itself. Next step is inclusion of code in the m files for various callbacks depending upon which actual functioning of the entire GUI will be
decided. When one has solved certain problem(s) with the help of MATLAB coding and has script
and / or function files already available, these can be directly used with the m file generated by
GUIDE for GUI designed therein. Here simple script files and function files are used to implement
the grounding system algorithm in the software form. In order to obtain input data for design of
substation grounding system, various GUI files have been designed with the help of GUIDE of
MATLAB. Data obtained from user with the help of GUIs in an interactive mode is then
manipulated by using different script files and function files in order to obtain optimal design of
substation grounding system as per user requirements. The program solves the design equations,
by fulfilling all the safety and geometrical constraints. GSA analyzes performance of the proposed
grounding system by rigorous analysis method implementing FE analysis concepts. GUI
developed with the help of MATLAB runs well in MATLAB environment, however if not deployed
as standalone application it may fail if appropriate version of MATLAB is not available. MATLAB
compiler add-on facilitates standalone application deployment which can be used by person with
little knowledge of software engineering. However in order to develop such applications using
MATLAB certain things are very much important. Main consideration while deploying any GUI as
standalone application using MATLAB is that all data transfer between various GUIs should be
implicit i.e. data transfer mechanism should be such that it facilitates smooth data transfer between
all the GUIs which are packed in a project file to generate executable application. There are variety
of methods for sharing data between various GUIs in MATLAB [9], however all of them does not
necessarily function well while application has to be deployed as standalone one. Here use of
application data (appdata) is made for data sharing between various input, processing and output
GUIs, script and function files. Handle passing scheme successfully facilitates data transfer
completely within the application without need of generating MAT files and loading and opening of
data files. Here graphic handles is carefully taken care of by and it serves the purpose of making
data transfer smooth and implicit to the standalone application even in the absence of MATLAB.
This otherwise would have been troublesome if use of MAT files and csv or xls files would have
been implemented. Certain instances are observed when an application runs properly in presence
of MATLAB but fails when deployed as standalone application which has to work with MATLAB
run time compiler. Here all such possibilities are avoided by following data sharing mechanism.
Data to be shared within GUI or among GUIs is set as application data with the help of
setappdata
Handle of the GUI from which data is to be taken is passed to the GUI to which the data is to
be sent
Application data is retrieved using appropriate graphic handle and getappdata
Occasionally important data is passed to the called function where the data is retrieved from
that function's varargin in opening function of the called GUI. After calculations the results can
be passed back to the calling function with the help of 'varargout' option available in output
function of the GUI.
This avoids creation of any MAT file and does not allow data to travel out of the application when it
has been compiled as standalone application. Because of this mechanism the application
becomes standalone in a true sense i.e. it works satisfactorily even when MATLAB is not
available. This is true for applications involving any no. of GUI files, script files and function files.
This may not look like a big task for professional software engineer. However the standalone
application deployment using MATLAB and that too in such situation when the application employs
several GUI files and m files altogether has been done probably for the first time in the field of
electrical engineering. Small standalone GUIs are found to be developed at many places, however
such large and professional like application has been developed for the first time in this
countryside. This opens a door for standalone application deployment for educational and training
purpose even by engineers not expert in professional programming languages but can manage
with MATLAB for their day to day use.

4. VALIDATION OF PERFORMANCE OF THE SOFTWARE

Before accepting any newly developed software one important stage is its testing. In order to
check performance of any software and declare it as reliable one, the results obtained by it need to
be verified against some standard or widely used expert software. The same thing is also true for
Grounding System Analyzer (GSA) software developed herein. For the purpose of checking the
validity of the results given by GSA for various problems, same are solved by Ground Grid
Systems module of ETAP- intelligent power system analysis software package used by number of
professionals throughout the world. Results obtained by both the software are compared for
variety of cases. Tables given in subsequent sections show the relevant data used for problems
under consideration and corresponding results obtained by aforementioned software tools. As
already mentioned GSA allows performance evaluation of any proposed grounding system by
taking data related to grid geometry, soil characteristics and system data.
4.1 Results and Analysis

5. CONCLUSION
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