New EEM/BEM hybrid method for electric field calculation in cable terminations

From the aspect of design and operation, cables and cable accessories are still very actual. Technological developments and the increasing need for electricity cause wider everyday cable termination applications. To ensure reliable performance over the cable system lifetime, design concepts, based on numerical calculations, must be correct. An Equivalent Electrodes Method/Boundary Elements Method-hybrid approach that allows electromagnetic field calculations in multilayer dielectric media including inhomogeneous regions is presented. Applications of the method to electric field calculations in cable terminations with finite thickness of dielectric stripes and stress cones are presented. Electric field distribution is considered for multilayer dielectrics with constant dielectric permittivity. The proposed method obtained results are compared with values obtained by using the finite elements method. It is shown that application of this hybrid numerical method is easier than the finite elements calculations in complex regions, and that the high degree of accuracy is achieved along with saving the computational time. A number of different constructions of cable terminations are experimentally verified using the proposed hybrid method.