Nagananthini Ravichandran

Power outages and transient disturbances caused by lightning strikes can lead to severe economic and operational disruptions, particularly in regions with high ground flash density. The highly stochastic nature of lightning, capable of driving voltages beyond insulation withstand levels within microseconds, necessitates advanced and efficient protection strategies. Conventional mitigation relies on the installation of surge arresters and shield wires; however, identifying an optimal configuration that ensures maximum protection with minimal resources remains a complex multi-objective challenge. Another issue in numerically identifying and evaluating this optimal location is that traditional methodologies, such as the Monte Carlo simulation combined with heuristic algorithms like the Genetic Algorithm, require a prohibitively large number of simulations to capture the random behaviour of lightning events. To overcome this limitation, this seminar presents a novel methodology that formulates the lightning protection design as a multi-objective optimization problem and integrates Design of Experiments techniques, specifically the Taguchi method, within a Decision Theory framework. The proposed Taguchi Multi-Area approach enables the efficient generation of representative scenarios through orthogonal arrays, drastically reducing computational effort while maintaining accuracy comparable to Monte Carlo simulations. The methodology provides balanced trade-off solutions between lightning flashover rates and the cost of protective devices, offering a practical, data-driven, and computationally efficient framework for optimizing lightning protection strategies in complex power distribution networks.

Biography:

Nagananthini Ravichandran is a Post-Doctoral Researcher at the University of Naples Federico II, where her work focuses on lightning protection, electromagnetic transients, and the reliability of power distribution systems. Her current research involves the optimal allocation of surge arresters and shield wires in distribution networks to improve lightning performance and enhance lightning resilience in wind farms. She received her PhD (cum laude) in Power Systems from the University of Naples Federico II in 2025. During this period, she was a visiting researcher at EPFL, Lausanne, where she studied upward lightning current parameters and frequency-dependent grounding behaviour. She earned her MEng in Power Electronics (2018), graduating as a gold medalist and university topper, and a Bachelor's in Electrical and Electronic Engineering (2015) from Anna University, India. She has authored more than 25 peer-reviewed journal and conference papers in collaboration with academic and industrial partners, focusing on optimized lightning protection and emerging applications such as floating photovoltaic power generation systems.

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