• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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• v.19 no.4
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• pp.93-102
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• 2018

This paper reports a Surge Protective Device (SPD) that is used to protect an automatic metering interface (AMI) power supplies of communication equipment on a low-voltage distribution system from a lightning current. The surge protective device (SPD) can be classified as one-port SPDs and two-port SPDs with decoupling elements depending on the connection type. The protection of internal systems against the lightning current may require a systematic approach consisting of coordinated SPDs. To deal with this, the definition of a lightning protection zone (LPZ) was studied and interpreted through a theoretical review. Because the lightning current resulting from a lightning surge is considerably high, there is limited protection from one SPD; therefore, coordinated cascaded MOV-based SPDs are installed to solve this problem. Regarding the power grid mentioned in this paper, a class II SPD for the low-voltage distribution system installed on the border of LPZ1 and LPZ2, which establish a protection coordination with the Arrester (LA, SA) that corresponds to the LPZO installed on the MOF stage connected to one system were designed to protect various communication (control) equipment, including the automatic meter reading system inside the branch-type electric supply panel of a building, not the incoming side of one system. In addition, performance-related tests were done by a comparison with the existing method through testing, and the optimal design was achieved for the 1-port SPD that uses a series connection and can bleed load current without any decoupling element.