FEVER – Fem Electrothermal solVER: application to an HVDC joint

Modeling and simulation activities play a central role in the analysis and development of HVDC systems. For this purpose, reliable numerical tools for 2D and 3D simulations are needed. This paper focuses on the simulation of temperature and electric field distributions in an HVDC cable-joint configuration. Numerical simulations are conducted using two different software, i.e. COMSOL Multiphysics and FEVER – Fem Electrothermal solVER, a finite element open source MATLAB code developed by the authors of this work at the University of Bologna at the Department of Electrical, Electronic and Information Engineering (DEI). FEVER is designed to solve thermal and electric stationary nonlinear axially-symmetric problems on triangular domains. We provide a brief description of the numerical techniques implemented in FEVER. The considered system is simulated with the two codes. The results obtained at several locations of the given geometry are validated against analytical expressions. The results yielded by FEVER are in good agreement with the ones obtained via COMSOL Multiphysics. We also provide a physical discussion of the obtained results in terms of thermal and electrical stress for the system.