A Life Loss Tool for an Optimal Management in the Operation of Insulated LV Power Cables

An optimized system management of a commercial and industrial power system must take care of the actual operational and energetic duty of the power system distribution. A procedure based on the Arrhenius model of the thermal aging of insulating materials allows introducing the relative time coefficient and promoting a heuristic method, as a rule of thumb, to estimate the life loss and the residual useful life for insulated power cables. This paper deals with simplified models of low-voltage (LV) cable systems characterized by one and two time constants to evaluate the cable temperature behavior and the influences of the ambient and installation conditions. Furthermore, this paper proposes a device to count the “life loss hours” for LV power cables of main/critical circuits.