Experimental study and analysis of breakdown characteristics of long air gaps with short tail lightning impulse

This paper describes experimental study and analysis of breakdown characteristics of long air gaps with short tail lightning impulse, which appears across the insulator strings on the transmission line by a lightning stroke. At first, starting conditions of leader propagation and leader developing process with the short tail lightning impulse are clarified by experiments. A new flashover model based on the experimental results is proposed in this paper. The proposed model consists of two simple equations, that give expression to the leader developing process, and can be realized very easily on the EMTP and other transient programs. A comparison of results calculated by the proposed model with the experimental results shows good agreement.