As Railways, Water pipes, Gas pipelines started sharing same corridors as high voltage power transmission or distribution lines, the electromagnetic interferences started causing damage to telecommunication equipments and pipelines. This again is causing wastage of money in equipment repairs and replacements and putting lots of lives in danger. Again, traditional hand calculation and excel sheet based methods just provide peace of mind to the analysts, leaving the real danger unattended. A lot of engineers still continue to use age old and unscientific assumptions of electrical separations to avoid taking the responsibility of handling the real issues. SES has developed three software packages that can be used to study the type of joint-use corridor for interference analysis.

SESTLC Pro
Right-of-Way Pro
MultiFields

The three software packages above varies from a simple estimating tool (SESTLCPro) to powerful and accurate tools (Right-of-Way Pro and MultiFields) that can be used for more complete analyses and to design corrective measures.

SESTLC Pro:
It can be used to quickly estimate line parameters, electric fields, and magnetic fields associated with arbitrary configurations of parallel transmission and distribution lines. It also estimates voltages and currents generated by electromagnetic interference on other neighboring metallic utilities, such as pipelines, railways and communications lines. However, because it assumes that the soil is uniform and considers the transmission line towers as hemispherical and far from the exposed line, it is not recommended for final studies and mitigation designs.

Right-of-Way Pro:
Right-of-Way Pro is based on circuit approach. It can rapidly model a corridor in which multiple energized and de-energized power line circuits and other utilities run alongside one another, at varying separation distances, for hundreds of miles. Right-of-way Pro can accommodate changing soil characteristics throughout the entire length of the corridor under study. Furthermore, it runs the inductive and capacitive coupling calculations very quickly. It is ideal for automated analysis of long right of way EMI studies.

MultiFields:
MultiFields is based on an exact field-theoretical approach which solves Maxwell’s equations directly. For AC interference studies, particular advantages of MultiFields include the simplicity of data entry and the seamless calculation and combination of inductive, capacitive and conductive components together. When compared with Right-of-Way Pro, the primary limitation is the representation in each simulation of a single soil structure, which can be uniform, two-layer, or multilayer for the entire corridor. Thus, depending upon the application, more than one run may be necessary, if the soil structure changes significantly throughout the corridor.