Power transmission lines: Worldwide research trends

Abstract

The importance of the quality and continuity of electricity supply is increasingly evident given the dependence of the world economy on its daily and instantaneous operation. In turn, the network is made up of power transmission lines. This study has been carried out based on the Scopus database, where all the publications, over 5000 documents, related to the topic of the power transmission lines have been analyzed up to the year 2022. This manuscript aims to highlight the main global research trends in power transmission lines and to detect which are the emerging areas. This manuscript cover three main aspects: First, the main scientific categories of these publications and their temporal trends. Second, the countries and affiliations that contribute to the research and their main research topics. Third, identification of the main trends in the field using the detection of scientific communities by means of the clustering method. The three main scientific categories found were Engineering, Energy and Computer Science. This research is most strongly developed in China, as the top 10 institutions are from this country, followed by USA and in third place by Russia. Twelve lines of research have been detected: Line Inspection, Leakage Current, Magnetic Fields, Fault Location, Icing, Lines Design, Natural Disasters, Temperature, Half-wave, Arc Flash, Pattern Recognition, and Artificial Intelligence. This research will open new perspectives for future research on power transmission lines.