New approach of thermal field and ampacity of underground cables using adaptive hp-FEM

Abstract

In this paper, we present the new approach to the thermal fields and Ampacity of underground cables in steady state using the adaptive Higher-Order Finite Element Method (hp-FEM). Where, the Delaunay algorithm based on the distance function is used for creating the adaptive mesh in the domain surrounding cables. In particular, for increasing the accuracy of solution, the higher-order elements (up to 7th order) are applied in our procedure. The advantages of the coupled Delaunay mesh and higher-order elements are to obtain the higher accurate solution and can decrease the CPU time. The proposed method has tested to two practical models of single- and double-circuit buried cables in the homogenous soil. The numerical results of this work were compared to the ones that obtained by Boundary Element (BEM), Finite Difference Methods (FDM) and the data of cable manufacturer. © 2010 IEEE.