STEADY‐STATE HEAT TRANSFER PERFORMANCE IN A HIGH VOLTAGE POWER CABLE

Empirical rules and experimental evidence are not capable of dealing with both geometric complexity and nonlinearities to design a sufficient accurate, reliable and affordable electrical device. To minimize this gap and to achieve an high performance level in the industry design of an electromagnetic device two CAD packages (electromagnetic CAD package and thermal CAD package) working in parallel processing should be used. In this paper these two packages have been used separately. The finite element technique is used to solve the heat conduction problem in complex devices of arbitrary shape with imposed boundary conditions. As an application example, the steady‐state temperature distribution will be produced for an high voltage cross‐linked polyethylene insulated power cable. The results are discussed and the importance of such a study as an aid to improve the life expectancy of high voltage power cables is pointed out. Finally, several conclusions are suggested to increase the power cable current transmission capacity.