Overview

Attend this webinar to understand related risks in the rail environment and undertake a review of projects and the complexities encountered.

This presentation will outline:

• learnings from recent rail projects
• tunnel environments where aspects of these complexities were encountered
• brief introduction to the safety critical importance of Traction Power Earthing and Bonding systems.

Additional information

Managing earthing related risk in the rail environment requires approaches that can be significantly different to those used for typical HV power systems. Hazardous voltages may be present not only under fault conditions but also due to the flow of traction currents under normal operations. Current draw of moving trains combined with currents injected by regenerative breaking, results in a power system load flow analysis where the connection points of multiple sources and multiple loads move based on timetables.

Typical earthing design approaches, applicable to above ground meshed power systems, are often difficult to implement in constrained tunnel environments where parallel exposure lengths are significant and available real estate is minimal. This combined with significantly higher likelihood of the presence of people, adds additional complexity to earthing system design.

About the speaker

Lachlan McKerrow, Principal Engineer, Safearth

Since 1999 Lachlan has been in the discipline of earthing providing consulting expertise to a range of key infrastructure projects in the industrial, transport and energy sectors. Now a Principal Engineer, Lachlan is responsible for leading a team of consultants servicing the defence infrastructure, rail, tunnelling, major construction as well as the renewable energy sectors. Lachlan graduated with BE (Elec) from the University of Newcastle in 1994 and worked for a small consulting firm servicing the mining and coal loading industry in Newcastle. Lachlan has 18 years’ experience in project management, primary and secondary design, training, construction support, field testing predominately in the area of earthing and lightning protection.

Click on the link below to register for this event.