Predictive Models of Current, Voltage, and Power Losses on Electric Transmission Lines

Abstract

A modern and civilized society is so much dependent on the use of electrical energy because it has been the most powerful vehicle for facilitating economic, industrial, and social developments. Electrical energy produced at power stations is transmitted to load centres from where it is distributed to its consumers through the use of transmission lines run from one place to another. As a result of the physical properties of the transmission medium, some of the transmitted power is lost to the surroundings. The overall effect of power losses on the system is a reduction in the quantity of power available to the consumers. An accurate knowledge of transmission losses is hinged on the ability to correctly predict the available current and voltage along transmission lines. Therefore, mathematical physics expressions depicting the evolution of current and voltage on a typical transmission line were formulated, and derived therefrom were models to predict available current and voltage, respectively, at any point on the transmission line. The predictive models evolved as explicit expressions of the space variable and they are in close agreement with empirical data and reality.