Arcing Horns - Operation

Operation

Arcing horns form a spark gap across the insulator with a lower breakdown voltage than the air path along the insulator surface, so an overvoltage will cause the air to break down and the arc to form between the arcing horns, diverting it away from the surface of the insulator. An arc between the horns is more tolerable for the equipment, providing more time for the fault to be detected and the arc to be safely cleared by remote circuit breakers. The geometry of some designs encourages the arc to migrate away from the insulator, driven by rising currents as it heats the surrounding air. As it does so, the path length increases, cooling the arc, reducing the electric field and causing the arc to extinguish itself when it can no longer span the gap. Other designs can utilise the magnetic field produced by the high current to drive the arc away from the insulator. This type of arrangement can be known as a magnetic blowout.

Design criteria and maintenance regimes may treat arcing horns as sacrificial equipment, cheaper and more easily replaced than the insulator, failure of which can result in complete destruction of the equipment it insulates. Failure of insulator strings on overhead lines could result in the parting of the line, with significant safety and cost implications.

Arcing horns thus play a role in the process of correlating system protection with protective device characteristics, known as insulation coordination. The horns should provide, amongst other characteristics, near-infinite impedance during normal operating conditions to minimise conductive current losses, low impedance during the flashover, and physical resilience to the high temperature of the arc.

As operating voltages increase, greater consideration must be given to such design principles. At medium voltages, one of the two horns may be omitted as the horn-to-horn gap can otherwise be small enough to be bridged by an alighting bird. Alternatively, duplex gaps consisting of two sections on opposite sides of the insulator can be fitted. Low voltage distribution systems, in which the risk of arcing is much lower, may not use arcing horns at all.

The presence of the arcing horns necessarily disturbs the normal electric field distribution across the insulator due to their small but significant capacitance. More importantly, a flashover across arcing horns produces an earth fault resulting in a circuit outage until the fault is cleared by circuit breaker operation. For this reason, non-linear resistors known as varistors can replace arcing horns at critical locations.