Research on Key Factors to Determine the Corrected Ampacity of Multicore Photoelectric Composite Cables

The ampacity of photoelectric composite cables largely depends on the temperature of their conductors, which in turn is related to other internal and external factors of the cable. Due to the thermal degradation associated with these factors, the cable can be damaged, regardless of its quality. To avoid this damage, an iterative parameter correction method (IPCM) is proposed and developed to correct the parameters of the cable before determining its ampacity based on the fitting function. Different optical fiber temperatures of the cable are collected using Brillouin optical time-domain analysis (BOTDA); together with the material parameters of the cable, they are modeled in ANSYS, which is a finite element modeling engineering software. Then, the IPCM is performed before determining the corrected ampacity. After conducting experiments on multiple groups of data, the results show that the calculation error is within the engineering error range. The mean error obtained with the proposed method is less than that obtained by the finite element method (FEM); it shows that the engineering adaptability improved by about 0.41%.