A coupled thermal/electric circuit model for design of MVDC ship cables

In this paper, an equivalent circuit approach is proposed to model the electric and thermal responses in DC cable systems intended for electric ships. The proposed model is sufficient to address the complexity of the nonlinear physics, including space charge accumulation within the dielectric, yet flexible enough to enable rigorous population-based design. Indeed, a genetic algorithm has been implemented to establish the Pareto-optimal fronts between mass, size and loss for cables of variable geometry and conductor material properties. In addition, the model is readily coupled to models of power converters, enabling the calculation of electric field variation due to converter switching as well as transient conditions including faults.