A Flexible Model to Calculate Buried Cable Ampacity in Complex Environments

The ampacity of buried cables is significantly influenced by the thermal properties of the burial environment. When these thermal properties are not homogeneous it is usually necessary to utilize simulations with a relatively high computational cost that may also use commercial software. In this paper an alternative approach is proposed using conformal maps. Temperature is calculated in an annular domain which is a conformal mapping of the half plane space. Circumferential dependence is captured by expanding temperature as a Fourier series, a finite difference solver then determines temperature components radially. The model is as flexible as any two-dimensional slice model of heat transfer through thermal conduction only. Two case studies are considered: three land-based cables in planar configuration and a submarine export cable. The thermal properties of both burial environments are based on conditions which may be encountered in the field and exhibit a high level of stratification. Using a finite element analysis simulation as a benchmark, typical percentage differences in cable ampacities were 0.5%−1%. In addition to accuracy and flexibility the low computational cost of the proposed approach allows for large parameter sweeps, which may be required in a design phase, without requiring commercial software.