Excerpt from the Proceedings of the 2011 COMSOL Conference in Stuttgart

Coupled Electro-thermal Field Simulation in HVDC-Cables

Hanyu Ye1, El Mehdi Boudoudou1, Eike Scholz1 and Markus Clemens1
1
Chair of Electromagnetic Theory, Bergische Universität Wuppertal, Germany

Abstract: Electric field distributions for high- using COMSOL Multiphysics. This enables us
voltage direct current cables (HVDC-cables) to simulate cables without rotational symmetry
are usually modeled as electrostatic problems in the cross-section. Additionally the mutual
under the assumption that the material dependence between temperature and electric
properties are linear. In this paper the field strength for both a stationary and a time-
nonlinear properties of the insulator material dependent model is examined based on the
polyethylene and the ohmic losses in the nonlinear weak coupling of the specific direct
insulation material are taken into account. current conductivity κ with the electric field
Results for coupled electro-thermal strength and the temperature.
simulations for a rotationally symmetric and a
non-rotationally symmetric model are 2. Problem Modeling
presented.
In this section the material properties of PE
Keywords: coupled electro-thermal field and the mathematical formulation for this
simulations, PE Cables problem are introduced.

1. Introduction 2.1 Material Properties

Compared to other conventional cables The insulation material PE is nonlinear and

such as oil-paper or mass-impregnated cables, has a low electric conductivity κ, which is
PE (Polyethylene) insulated cables have some affected by temperature and field strength. The
advantages: light weight, almost maintenance specific direct current conductivity κ can be
free, simple chemical assembly and good approximated by the following function, which
electric-thermal properties. Thus it has is often used in the related literature [4, 5, 6]:
commercial and technical advantages to use
PE as the insulation material for the HVDC- k (,| E |)  k0  exp(  )  exp(  | E |) (1)
cables, especially for long-distance power
transmission. The electric field distribution in
the insulation depends on the conductivity κ of k0 specific direct current conductivity at
the insulation material which is affected by the 0℃ and 0kV/mm
temperature and the electric field strength.  temperature in ℃
However most simulations for HVDC-cables E electric field in kV/mm
are performed as electrostatic problems under  temperature coefficient of the specific
the assumption that the material properties are direct current conductivity
linear and the thermal effects are neglected as  field strength coefficient of the
well. specific direct current conductivity
A coupled electro-thermal one dimen- The typical values for Polyethylene are [2]:
sional model of a rotationally symmetric
HVDC-model-cable is presented in [1], taking
  0,1K 1
the nonlinear properties of the insulator
material into account. But in that publication   0.1mm / kV
the ohmic losses in the insulation are
neglected, because the conductivity κ is always Standard values for other polymeric isolation
very low in the PE insulation compared to κ in materials are given in [7]. The PE-Compounds
copper conductor [2]. In this paper the ohmic can be significantly distinguished by the
losses in the insulation are also considered and absolute specific conductivity k0 . A com-
the results are compared to the results in [3]. parison of the coefficients for some different
Furthermore an extended two-dimensional types of PE-Compounds is given in table 1.
model for the coupled electro-thermal
simulation of HVDC-cables is implemented
 For HVDC-cables the term  t  can be
Material
[S/mm] [ ℃] [mm/kV] omitted because the applied voltage is
VPE constant. With ohm’s law J  k  E and
Type A 0,086 0,137 E   grad , where k  k ( , E ) , eqn. 3 can
MDPE
be transformed to:
Type B 0.094 0,121
VPE
Type B 0,108 0,115
div(k (T ,  )  grad )  0 , (4)

Table 1: Parameters of the specific conductivity where T is the temperature in K, φ is the scalar
for the different PEs [3]. potential and is the approximated
material property function (Eqn. 1).

The temperature distribution in the insulation

material is described by the heat conduction
equation, which is derived from Fourier’ law
and the law of energy conservation [8]:

C p   tT  div  gradT  QE  QM (5)

where is the heat capacity at constant

pressure, is the density, is the thermal
conductivity, QE describes electric heat sources
and QM describes mechanic heat sources. For
Fig. 1: An approximated function for the specific
direct current conductivity for MDPE Type B [3] this application QM can be neglected and QE
consists of two parts: joule heating from the
The field- and temperature-dependent conduc- cable QC and ohmic losses from QI in the
tivity κ of the insulation material MDPE Type insulation material with:
B, which is mathematically approximated via
eqn. 1, can be found in Fig. 1.
QI  k (T ,  )  ( grad )2 . (6)
It should be noted that the heat conductivity of
PE depends on the temperature. For the cable Thus the eqn. 5 can be written as:
MDPE type B the thermal conductivity can be
approximated as: C p   tT  div  gradT  QC  QI .(7)

   0,72  0,001 T  , (2) Now the eqn. 3 and eqn. 7 can be weakly
coupled by the material property eqn. 1. They
where is the absolute temperature in and can be solved numerically using the FEM
this formula is valid just for ℃ ℃ (Finite Element Method) software COMSOL
[3]. Multiphysics, if the geometry and the
boundary conditions are given. For this paper
they are discretized in space using FEM with
2.2 Mathematical Formulation higher order elements. Time integration is
done by a suitable time integrator [9].
The electric field distribution is mathe-
matically described by partial differential For the stationary situation the heat conduction
equations, which are derived from the equation can be formulated as:
continuity equation:
div  gradT  QC  QI , (8)
divJ  t   0 . (3)
under the assumption that the inflowing heat to
the inspected domain is equal to the
outflowing heat from this domain.
3. Numerical Results values of , the electric field strength at the
outside field shielding decreases.
The simulations are realized using the in
COMSOL integrated Joule Heating model.
Different simulations are carried out to
examine the influence of the temperature on
the distribution of the electric field for
stationary and time-dependent cases. For the
stationary case, the influence of the
temperature difference across the insulation
material and the coefficient for the material
function is investigated. Additionally the
simulation results for a non-rotationally
symmetric model are presented.

3.1 Simulation Model

To compare the simulation results with the

results in [3], a simplified small two-
dimensional sample model of a real power Fig. 2: The simplified simulation model
cable insulation is used (Fig. 2). The copper
conductor can be seen as a cylinder and its
potential is set to 200kV. To simplify the
problem, the conductor has been cut out of the
model and replaced with an equivalent
boundary condition. The outside field
shielding is set to 0kV. The simulation results
are evaluated along an evaluation line which is
shown in Fig. 3.

3.2 Stationary Study

In this study the simulations are carried out

under the assumption that the surface
temperature of the inside conductor is constant Fig. 3: The evaluation line along the radius of
at ℃, because the experiments in [3] are the insulation material
realized with this temperature. The non-
linearity of PE insulation material, especially
the dependence on the temperature, has the
following consequence: The temperature
difference between the inside conductor
and the outside field shielding has a significant
influence on the electric field distribution in
the insulation material [2, 10, 11]. Fig. 4 and
Fig. 5 show the temperature and electric field
distributions in the insulation material.
Normally the electrostatic field strength is
higher at the inner radius than at the outer one.
From Fig. 5 we can see that the electric field
strength decreases at the inside radius and
increases at the outside radius if the
temperature difference increases. This
effect is called inversion of field strength [12]. Fig. 4: Temperature distributions for the different
Additionally the influence of the electric field , with and
coefficient with a constant for the field
distribution is shown in Fig. 6. For increasing
 Fig. 8: Electric field distributions during the heating
Fig. 5: Electric field distributions for the different
, with and
3.3 Time-dependent Study

In this subsection the simulations for the

heating process are described. The electro-
static field distribution of a normal cylindrical
capacitor is used as the initial value for the
time integrator and a time-dependent solver
BDF is selected to solve this problem. A
general inward heat flux is set as the
boundary condition at the inner radius. At the
outer radius the heat flux is set to an outward
heat flux with , where
is the ambient temperature with ℃. As
in the stationary study, the potential at the
inner radius is set to 200kV and the outer
radius is grounded. The temperature
distribution and electric field distribution
Fig. 6: Electric field distributions for the different during the heating process are shown in Fig. 7
, with and Fig. 8. With the increasing temperature
over time and increasing temperature
difference across the insulation material the
field inversion effect occurs.

3.4 A non-rotationally symmetric model

Simulations for an extended non-

rotationally symmetric model are also carried
out (Fig. 9). With increasing temperature the
thermoplastic insulation material, e.g. LDPE
(low density Polyethylene), becomes softer
and the inner conductor sags because of
gravity [13]. For this case the cable is no
longer rotationally symmetric. The result for
the stationary solution of this model in the
cross-section is shown in Fig. 10. It shows that
Fig. 7: Temperature distributions during the heating the electric field in lower areas is much larger
than in the other areas. The electric field along
the evaluation line 1 with different is also
presented in Fig. 11. Fig. 12 shows the electric
field distributions during the heating process
for this model. This result is very similar to the
results of the heating process for the
rotationally symmetric model.

Fig. 12: Electric field distributions along the

evaluation line 1 during the heating process

4. Conclusions
Fig 9: The non-rotationally symmetric model and
the 2 evaluation lines (red) For the PE insulated cables both the
temperature differences across the insu-
lation material and the electric field coefficient
have a significant influence on the electric
field distribution because PE has a nonlinear
electric conductivity which can be
approximated as a function of the temperature
and the electric field. A phenomenon known as
field inversion occurs at higher temperature
differences across the insulation material. This
can lead to space charge accumulation, which
is generally claimed to be one of the main
factors for degradation of the insulation
material [14]. In [3] ohmic losses were
neglected, despite of the nonlinearity of the
material properties. Our results show that this
Fig 10: Electric field distribution in assumption is reasonable, at least for the
The cross-section of the cable inspected parameters. Our coupled electric-
thermal simulation results for a two-
dimensional rotationally symmetric model
using COMSOL match the results in [3] well.
The concordance of theory and numerical
simulation indicates that results for more
complex models are trustworthy. Therefore, an
extended non-rotationally symmetric model
has been assembled and simulated for the
stationary and the time-dependent problems.
For this model the inversion of electric field
takes place as well.

5. References

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