Research on flexible graphite-copper composited electrical grounding material

The metallic grounding material such as copper, steel and alloys plating used in power system nowadays are facing lots of problems such as corrosion, high maintenance cost and so on. To solve these problems, a new type of grounding material-the flexible graphite-copper composited grounding material (FGCG) was proposed and produced .The raw materials include high purity graphite, copper, organic and inorganic fibres, adhesive and so on. The framework consists of copper and fibres, supported and held by graphite and adhesive. Finally, a new grounding material is made with hierarchical stranded structure, namely FGCG. The skin effect of steel, copper and FGCG can be investigated by electromagnetic analysis using finite element method (FEM) in high frequency and low frequency situation respectively. On this basis of heat source obtained by electromagnetic analysis, the comparison of dynamic thermal stability between traditional metallic material and FGCG is calculated by coupled electromagnetic-thermal analysis. The result indicates that the short circle current withstand capacity of FGCG is much higher than traditional metallic material because of smaller skin effect and high thermal capacity of graphite.