Backflashover Rate Estimation for Overhead Transmission Lines via Unscented Transform Method

Assessing the lightning performance of a transmission line is a crucial task. However, depending on the characteristics of the system, this evaluation may be made unfeasible by the computational effort required in the simulations. In this sense, this paper presents a novel methodology to estimate the backflashover rate on transmission lines. All transient analyses are made with the support of Alternative Transients Program. According to results, compared to traditional techniques such as Monte Carlo simulation, the proposed method allows estimating transmission lines outages due to lightning with a speedup of the order of 96 times with percentage deviation lower than 5% in most cases.