Research on key technology to determine the exact maximum allowable current-carrying ampacity for submarine cables

Abstract

The maximum allowable current-carrying ampacity (MACCA) of a photoelectric composite submarine cable in its design phase is usually patterned considering the weather. However, variations in sea temperature, the uncertainty of the cable's material parameters and the laying environment of the cable greatly influence its CCA. The impact of these factors can damage the cable, regardless of its quality. For this purpose, this paper proposes a developed iterative parameters correction method (IPCM) based on Chord principles, to determine the exact MACCA by means of finite element method (FEM). Different optical fiber temperatures of the cable are collected using Brillouin Optical Time-Domain Analysis (BOTDA); together with the material parameters of the cable, they are modeled in ANSYS modeling software. Then, the proposed approach is conducted before determining the exact MACCA. Results obtained from experiments performed on different data groups show that the mean error rate obtained with the proposed approach is just about 3.78, while that of the other four recent approaches, including AP1, AP2, AP3 and AP4 is about 4.59, 3.96, 4.13 and 4.80, respectively.