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AutoGrid Pro

A powerful integrated environment for carrying out grounding studies.



Technical Description

This powerful, yet easy-to-use software package provides a simple, integrated and automated environment for carrying out grounding studies. It consists of several integrated computation modules that are designed to study the effectiveness of grounding installations with respect to electrical safety of both personnel and equipment, enabling you to suggest improvements to existing installations or to design new installations.

With AutoGrid Pro you can:

  • Model grounding grids of any shape
  • Account for the presence of nearby passive or energized buried structures; several electrodes can be modeled simultaneously
  • Interpret soil resistivity measurements obtained with the Wenner, Schlumberger, Unipolar, Dipole-Dipole or generalized methods
  • Model a wide variety of complex soil types
  • Account for the presence of transmission lines, distribution lines or cables connected to the grounding system, i.e. compute the distribution of fault current along the circuits connected to the main grid (overhead ground wires, shield wires, neutral conductors, or cable sheaths and armours), thereby reducing the net amount of fault current injected into the main grid
  • Obtain the resistance of any grounding system and its ground potential rise, as well as that of nearby buried metallic structures
  • Calculate the expected earth potentials, touch and step voltages anywhere inside or outside the installation
  • Establish the criteria to be used when evaluating safety issues, and identify regions where safe limits are exceeded

Additional Features

CAD-Based Environment
  • Full 3D drawing capabilities to create the grid and any type of rod at any location. No restrictions on the geometry
  • Doubles as a central location for project management
  • Several tools are available to simplify the creation of complex structures and to move, rotate, and view the grid from any angle
  • Object Database: quickly add commonly encountered structures to your design, or store your own structures

Ampacity Calculator

The following quantities can be included with the ampacity module:

  • Ampacity of conductors
  • Minimum size of conductors capable of carrying a certain current
  • Temperature rise during a fault

Reporting Tools
  • Text reports and list of materials
  • 2D-curve plots
  • 3D-perspective plots
  • Color intensity plots
  • Contour plots
  • Plots can be produced in most popular graphics formats. Plots can be specified in regular 2D or in color spots and in a 3D mode which displays computation results directly over the grounding system configuration.

Comprehensive Help
  • Key screens provide illustrations clearly representing the data to be entered
  • Extensive context-sensitive online help for each field or item on your screen is just a keystroke or mouse click away
  • Detailed, step-by-step “How To...” engineering manual guides you through each modeling task and explains technical concepts based on a realistic grounding installation
  • Our support services are second to none



An AutoGrid Pro Package for Your Needs & Budget

You shouldn't have to settle for a substandard grounding package due to budgetary considerations. The component-based nature of the AutoGrid Pro software packages enables you to focus on your immediate needs, from the computation of the resistance of a simple grid to a complete safety analysis of a substation's complex grounding system. Two AutoGrid Pro packages are available, enabling you to select the right option according to your requirements:

This package can be used to compute the resistance and potential rise of any arbitrarily shaped grounding system and the earth potentials throughout any region of interest, and to conduct a full analysis of touch and step voltages at any location inside or outside the grid. It also includes a resistivity measurement analysis module for converting measured data into a suitable soil model that may be comprised of no more than two horizontal layers.

SESAmpacity, the conductor ampacity computation application, is included with this package, as well as a powerful computation module for determining the distribution of fault current between a grounding system and other metallic paths including: overhead ground wires, shield wires, neutral conductors, and cable sheaths or armours.

The Circuit module is used when the contributions of transmission and distribution circuits adjacent to the grounding system have to be taken into account. You can specify the geometrical locations of the neutral and phase wires as well as the electrical characteristics of the neutral wires, or these quantities can be selected from an extensive conductor library. You can also add your own products to the databases. Alternatively, for a finer control, you have the option of explicitly specifying the wire impedances. An input processor is available to view the circuits and their characteristics.

Adds to the above several useful soil models, including multilayer horizontally layered soils, vertically layered soils, spherically and cylindrically layered soils and an all-purpose finite-volume soil model consisting of several arbitrarily shaped regions with different electrical properties.

The computational engine of AutoGrid Pro is based on the MALT, RESAP, and FCDIST computation modules.

Both AutoGrid Pro packages include an AutoGroundDesign software package having similar capabilities and restrictions. So for example, the two-layer and multilayer versions of AutoGrid Pro respectively include the two-layer and multilayer versions of AutoGroundDesign.