Analysis method for the design of long submarine cables

The recent push for renewable electrical energy sources has resulted in a significant increase in the installation of the offshore wind farms. These farms become much bigger than their earlier counterparts and the generated power is much larger. This puts additional performance requirements on the export cables. Long submarine export cables are not only subjected to changing laying conditions along the route, including depth and seabed material variations, but also the loading patterns vary significantly over time. Additionally, applied reactive power compensation measures and the time-dependent grid situation change the distribution of the current along the route. These unique features of long submarine power cables necessitate a new type of approach to their design and construction optimization. This paper introduces a new approach for ampacity calculations of long submarine power cables. As the ampacity calculations form a basis for the design of a cable route, it is of paramount importance that they are performed as accurately as possible. The approach can be applied to general-purpose circuit solvers, and this paper describes how to implement it using the ATP-EMTP software, which is extended to the consideration of concurrent electrical and thermal effects. The approach permits considering all the important local and time-dependent parameters of the analysis simultaneously. In particular, the approach allows simultaneous analysis of the varying laying conditions along the route including changes in the depth of burial and thermal resistivity of the soil together with the temporal variations of the cable loading. Additionally, current characteristics in long AC cable conductors are strongly affected by the reactive power flow, which in turn depends on the location of the reactive power compensation, the reactive power demand for grid operation, and the wind farm voltage reactive power control strategy. Such analysis cannot be performed with any existing analytical tool. Also, numerical tools cannot handle such problems because a 3-dimensional time-dependent analysis of a cable route which is 100 km long would encounter convergence problems as the size of such model would be prohibitive. Hence, at present, the proposed approach is the only one available to solve this complex electro-thermal problem. Several numerical examples illustrate an application of the proposed methodology.