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Underground cables can produce higher electromagnetic fields directly above them than an overhead line. The majority of cable failures on distribution system are caused by defects in the cable accessories. Nowadays, significant research has been carried out worldwide into examining whether electricity, and in particular, the presence of electric and magnetic fields have an adverse impact on health, especially the occurrence of cancer and childhood leukemia. The purpose of this paper is to optimize the electric field distribution in underground cable accessories. This reduces the impact of the harmful effects of the fields on living beings and humans.

Cable terminations and joints are designed to eliminate the stress concentration at the termination screen to avoid the breakdown of the cable and high values of electric field at these points. Any improvement in the cable termination and joints construction is of great interest. There are several methods for the solution of electric field distribution. These can be summarized as analytical, experimental, free-hand field mapping, analogue methods and numerical methods. In this paper cable accessories are modeled by using multilayer dielectric system and very thin deflector’s cones.

This model includes specific insulators design and smart choice of electrodes position. Stress-grading nonlinear materials in form of tapes and tubes were used with much success. In order to optimize the cable joint parameters, two criteria were monitored – total electric field magnitude and magnitude of the tangential component. More than 30 percent is reduced impact of cables on the environment.

In order to investigate the accuracy of the applied numerical model, various configurations of the cable accessories are studied. The first time is applied new Hybrid Boundary Elements Method on the protection of the environment.

In high voltage direct current cable systems, cable joints are known as the least reliable components due to the use of multiple dielectrics. Resulting from the electric field and temperature depending conductivity of the different dielectrics, field enhancement at critical areas, e.g. triple points, may result in accelerated aging and the failure of the component. To reduce the stress, different field grading techniques are applied. The purpose of this study is to investigate different grading techniques for cable joints. Different shapes of the electrode and a varying nonlinear conductivity of field grading materials (FGM) are used for the simulation of the electric field.

Coupled electro-thermal field simulations are applied for different joint geometries, to obtain the stationary electric field. Electric field simulations in cable joint using geometric and nonlinear field grading techniques are shown.

Using the geometric field grading, the shape of the stress cone determines the field values in critical areas (triple points). High stress reduction is obtained for a certain curvature of the stress cone. For the nonlinear stress control, materials with a higher conductivity in comparison to the cable and the joint material are used. A field reduction is obtained by increasing the total conductivity. On the other hand, this is also increasing the insulation losses within the total FGM. More applicable is the decrease of the switching field or the increase of nonlinearity, which is only locally increase the conductivity and the insulation losses. Furthermore, simulations results show that an approximately constant field reduction is obtained, if the nonlinearity is above a certain threshold.

This study is restricted to a field dependency of FGM only. For impulse voltages, high temperature and electric conductivity values my result in a thermal runaway. Furthermore, only direct current field grading techniques are studied.

The field grading of cable joints, using geometric and nonlinear techniques, is analyzed. A comparison between the electric field, by varying the curvature of the ground stress cone or the FGM conductivity constants in a complex joint geometry is novel. With its effect on the electric fields, general requirements for the geometry (geometric field grading) or the values of the FGM constants (nonlinear field grading) are defined to obtain a sufficient field grading.

In high voltage direct current (HVDC), power cables heat is generated inside the conductor and the insulation during operation. A higher amount of the generated heat in comparison to the dissipated one, results in a possible thermal breakdown. The accumulation of space charges inside the insulation results in an electric field that contributes to the geometric electric field, which comes from the applied voltage. The total electric field decreases in the vicinity of the conductor, while it increases near the sheath, causing a possible change of the breakdown voltage.

Here, the thermal breakdown is studied, also incorporating the presence of space charges. For a developed electro-thermal HVDC cable model, at different temperatures, the breakdown voltage is computed through numerical simulations.

The simulation results show a dependence of the breakdown voltage on the temperature at the location of the sheath. The results also show only limited influence of the space charges on the breakdown voltage.

The study is restricted to one-dimensional problems, using radial symmetry of the cable, and does not include any aging or long-term effect of space charges. Such aging effect can locally increase the electric field, resulting in a reduced breakdown voltage.

A comparison of the breakdown voltage with and without space charges is novel. The chosen approach allows for the first time to assess the influence of space charges and field inversion on the thermal breakdown.