Calculation Software Design On Ampacity And Temperature Field Of Power Cables

With the rapid growth in domestic economy, as well as the great expansion of research on cross-ocean power transmission and the society’s increasing attention to the environment protection in our country, power cables have been widely used in the power system recently. The operating temperature in the insulation should not exceed the insulation’s temperature limit, and the ampacity calculation is the most important part of a cable project. Methods of calculating the power cable ampacity could be classified into three kinds:analytical method, numerical methods and experimental method. Software designing of ampacity calculation has not been well developed yet, and the existing ampacity calculating software packages are mostly based on the analytical method. There has not been such professional software which includes all the main methods of the power cable ampacity calculation.A software package which is able to calculate the power cable ampacity and temperature field ether with analytical method named the equivalent thermal resistance method or with a numerical method named the finite element method has been designed in this work. At the beginning, current researchs on the calculation of the power cable ampacity have been reviewed. The equivalent thermal resistance method and the finite element method have been introduced in detail in the next part of this research, and the two methods are the core algorithm of the software that is designed in this work. Then the software architecture is given, and the software is developed using C#with the compiler platform named Visual Studio. The designed software has three main functions:calculating the cable ampacity using the equivalent thermal resistance method, calculating the cable ampacity using the finite element method, calculating the cable’s temperature field using finite element method. The software is tested in the last part of this work and test result proves that correct computing values could be given by the software designed in this research.