Articles techniques et présentations

Electric power, in cities or for power plant outflow, is most often transmitted through underground cables. Due to increased electricity demands power suppliers make large investments to house these cables in deep or shallow tunnels.

The thermal environment is complex, with different kind of cables placed in different configurations, transmitting different powers. These are hard to take into account theorically, so thermal simulations using COMSOL Multiphysics® software were undertaken to measure the inaccuracy of the empirical models.

The Conjugate Heat Transfer interface is used, 2D and 3D models were developed and showed that several hypotheses lead to underestimation of the hottest cable temperature and two interesting possibility for improvement were found: the heat transfer correlations and cables proximity effects