Application of the hp-finite element method to modeling thermal fields of high voltage underground cables buried in multi-layer soil

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate the application of the adaptive higher-order Finite Element Method (hp-FEM) to heat transfer problems in electrical engineering. The proposed method is developed based on the combination of the Delaunay mesh and higher-order interpolation functions. In which the Delaunay algorithm based on the distance function is used for creating the adaptive mesh in the whole solution domain and the higher-order polynomials (up to 9th order) are applied for increasing the accuracy of solution. To evaluate the applicability and effectiveness of this new approach, we applied the proposed method to solve a benchmark heat problem and to calculate the temperature distribution of some typical models of buried double- and single -circuit power cables in the homogenous and multi-layer soils, respectively.