Application of the adaptive 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 9^th 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.